A joyful love letter to the cold and an impassioned call for its conservation
Global warming is often discussed as an issue of heat—but an equally pressing issue, as our planetary thermometer continues its slow rise, is one of cold. Cold places are warming at a faster rate than hot places, and this loss of cold will have major consequences for our world as it reshapes ecosystems and infrastructure alike. Cold Comfort is an impassioned argument for the importance of cold that compels readers to fall in love with this endangered resource before it’s too late.
Cold Comfort charts a year in author Miranda Weiss's hometown of Homer, Alaska, from an unusually dreary summer that opens into a lovely, frigid winter. Each chapter explores a different facet of the cold, as Weiss guides readers through majestic, icy adventures, from the cosmic cooling that led to our planet’s creation to the unique properties of ice and snow. In prose as beautiful and intricate as a snowflake, Cold Comfort draws from science, culture, and history to show the value of the cold to us as individuals, as societies, and as a species.
Combining the quiet joy of Wintering with the urgency of Life on a Little-Known Planet, Cold Comfort is an exuberant and endlessly curious love letter to the cold. Weiss’s contagious sense of awe and gorgeous descriptions of the natural world will convince even the chilliest among us of the importance and wonder of this natural resource.
"Winter is the magic time on our planet, when friction disappears and we get to glide across its surface. This fine book captures the charm, and the importance, of the cold--never more than now, as our carbon emissions threaten to banish it." --Bill McKibben, author Here Comes the Sun
Cold Comfort
Tide, Feather, Snow
Alaska is a place where know-how is currency and a novice’s mistakes can kill you. An extreme landscape in both its beauty and challenges, the state is nicknamed “The Last Frontier” with good reason: Here is a paradoxical landscape where boundaries — between community and isolation, bounty and deprivation, conservation and exploitation — are constantly in flux. But the state has also always been a place for reinvention, a refuge as much for those desperate to escape something as for those on a quest for something else.
“A skilled and poetic witness to a place undergoing incessant change.”
-- Anthony Doerr, author of All the Light We Cannot See
“In this exceptional book…we can see textures of the ocean, smell and taste the salt air, and feel the cold crisp snow. Alaska is a captivating land, and this book does justice to it. Highly recommended.”
-- Starred Review, Library Journal
Tide, Feather, Snow by Miranda Weiss
this is the place
A New York Time's Editor's Choice
Home is a loaded word, a complex idea. In this thought-provoking collection, 30 women explore the concept of home and how it makes, breaks and shapes us. In personal essays about neighbors, marriage, kids, sentimental objects, homelessness, domestic violence, solitude, immigration, gentrification, geography and more, contributors -- including Amanda Petrusich, Naomi Jackson, Jane Wong, and Jennifer Finney Boylan -- lend a range of voices to this subject that remains at the core of our national conversations. What makes a home? What do equality, safety, and politics have to do with it? And why is it so important to us to feel like we belong?
This collection, encompassing a spectrum of races, ethnicities, religions, sexualities, political beliefs and classes, could not be timelier. ...open this book, hear its chorus of voices and remember that we are a nation of individuals, bound to each other by our humanity. -- The New York Times Book Review