Winter is a soulful, studied meditation on the season that most captures our imagination . . . highly recommended.
Description
The 2011 CBC Massey Lectures celebrates fifty years with bestselling author, essayist, cultural observer, and famed New Yorker contributor Adam Gopnik, whose subject is winter -- the season, the space, the cycle.
Gopnik takes us on an intimate tour of the artists, poets, composers, writers, explorers, scientists, and thinkers, who helped shape a new and modern idea of winter. Here we learn how a poem by William Cowper heralds the arrival of the middle class; how snow science leads to existential questions of God and our place in the world; how the race to the poles marks the human drive to imprint meaning on a blank space. Gopnik’s kaleidoscopic work ends in the present day, when he traverses the underground city in Montreal, pondering the future of Northern culture.
A stunningly beautiful meditation buoyed by Gopnik’s trademark gentle wit, Winter is at once an enchanting homage to an idea of a season and a captivating journey through the modern imagination. This deluxe 50th anniversary edition includes full-colour images printed on two 8-page inserts.
Reviews
...outstanding...[Adam Gopnik's] windows on winter illuminate varied aspects of the season, but, more profoundly, they also shed light on the human condition and our complex relationship with nature.
...charming...[Adam Gopnik's essays] provide a timely reminder that we still have something to learn about the season.
... a stream of endlessly entertaining insights and ideas -- a treasury of people and places and art.