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e_z's review against another edition
adventurous
informative
reflective
slow-paced
4.0
This is exactly the kind of book you’d expect from a lady who was trying to write something else from an artist residency in Greenland. It very much delivered on the title with random ice stories and facts!
foggy_rosamund's review
4.0
While The Library of Ice is broad in scope, it's also precise and direct. It never becomes overly long or too sprawling, as a book of this nature could. Over seven years, Campbell travelled around icy regions of the world, beginning in Greenland, and also exploring Iceland, Switzerland and the US, as well as researching the history of Antarctic exploration. She goes to Greenland mainly because she finds an artist's residency there, but becomes fascinated by the icy world and the people who live there. Ice is also undergoing a period of great change: in our lifetimes there may be no more ice, and so this is both an elegy as well as a study. Campbell describes early understandings of ice, from the belief that diamonds came from ice, to the work of Robert Boyle, who experimented on ice at a time when freezers didn't exist and could only work in the depths of winter. She writes about people inspired by ice, such as Danish artists working in Greenland, and nature writers such as Thoreau, or the great novelists of Iceland. This is a carefully researched and beautifully written book, drawing on poetry, novels, scientific research and the diaries and letters of explorers. Though it's short, it took me a week to read because I found myself wanting to research different angles and follow up on things mentioned in the book, helped by the excellent bibliography. Some of the chapters interested me more than others: I found the chapter on curling and figure-skating hard to get through, but could have read five or six more chapters about Greenland -- but overall, this is a very interesting read, and an excellent look at the many different facets of ice and the ways it exists in cultural study as well as science. I'm curious to read Campbell's other books, especially her poetry collection about Greenland.
isering's review against another edition
4.0
Absolute dream job. Campbell drifts from writer's retreat to writer's retreat, reads about ice (ice skating, physics, art, music, you name it) and writes about that and her travels. Some bits I skimmed, some were fascinating. The cover undersells it!