Arctic Dreams: Imagination and Desire in a Northern Landscape
A book-length meditation on the far North drawn from roughly five years Lopez spent traveling the Alaskan and Canadian Arctic, weaving natural history (muskoxen, polar bears, narwhals), Inuit culture, the history of Arctic exploration, and reflection on how landscape shapes human imagination. It won the 1986 National Book Award for Nonfiction.
Twenty pages on muskoxen. That is the stretch where one reader "limped along just a few pages at a time before admitting defeat," and where even a sympathetic reviewer says "I would particularly excise the chapter on musk oxen." The rest of the 496-page Vintage paperback runs on the same gear, one encyclopedic wildlife file after another: "this sort of meditative exercise disguised as a book just didn't really do it for me," a detractor writes. Four decades have made it worse, not better: "The book is badly under-illustrated (2001 trade-paper reprint), and a fair bit of the information is now outdated." The science is a 1986 snapshot, the politics are Prudhoe Bay oil-boom politics, and there are barely any maps or photos to check either against.
The case for it and the rest of the canon open with Pro.
