A Winter Book

Doing my usual looking around, I found what looks like a very interesting book. I am going to see if I can get it. For now I will give you the title and the synopsis and the cover and maybe you will be as interested in it as I am.

WINTER
By Adam Gopnik

review
by Victoria Segal


It's fitting that Adam Gopnik's meditations on winter should have their origins in "five improvised living room lectures" delivered to friends and family and supported by "the cheer of wine and coffee". As the New Yorker writer argues, it was only with proper heating  the book discusses firewood prices and the invention of radiators  that winter can be appreciated as a thing of beauty rather than a marrow-chilling menace, and there is a chattiness to these essays that suggests he is talking to a fireside circle while nature glints and freezes outside. Gopnik covers a vast amount of ground from this safe space including his beloved ice hockey and the mysteries behind the modern Christmas. There are considerations of Wordsworth and former ice hockey player Wayne Gretzky, Joni Mitchell and Mary Shelley, why polar exploration lacked homoerotic heat ("There must have been a man who put the sex in sextant"), while skating's golden age was a flirtatious whirl. Climate change shadows Gopnik's favourite seasonal things, however, threatening winter's role in marking time and memory: fortunately, the book is there to record it all before the thaw.