Arctic Dreams

Lopez spent years traveling the Arctic — the sea ice, the tundra, the wildlife, the Inuit communities, the history of European exploration that was really a history of European projection onto a landscape that had its own logic. He writes about musk oxen and polar bears and narwhals with the same attention he gives to the light and the silence and the specific quality of Arctic time. Won the National Book Award in 1986. The foundational visitor dispatch from the Arctic and still the most beautiful — a meditation on what happens to a human being who pays attention to an extreme landscape for long enough.