Winter: Five Windows On the Season

- Gopnik, Adam
- House of Anansi Press / August 2011
- Paperback / 288 pages
- ISBN 9780887849749 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. - read less Adam Gopnik is the author of Paris to the Moon and Through the Children's Gate and is a contributor to The New Yorker. He lives in New York City with his wife and two children. His most recent book is Angels and Ages: A Short Book About Darwin, Lincoln and Modern Life, a comparison about how those men changed our nation with their history-making actions.