RaveThe GuardianWhat Lopez understood, or came to discover through experience, was that detail anchors perception in a vast space. So his prose is varifocal. Again and again, he evokes the reach and clarity of an Arctic panorama, and then zooms in on a close-up ... The effect for the reader of these sudden shifts of perspective is exhilarating, as though Lopez has gripped you by the shoulder and pressed his binoculars to your eyes ... Lopez\'s scientific training also helped him. Through it, he came to realize the importance of fact as a carrier of wonder. Arctic Dreams is packed with data: about the crystallography of frazil ice, or the thermodynamics of polar-bear hair. However, this information is deployed not to summarize the landscape and its organisms, but to make them more astonishing ... Light is something about which Lopez writes brilliantly ... Perhaps the best way to think of Lopez is as a postmodern devout. His prose—priestly, intense, grace-noted—carries the hushed urgency of the sermon. Irony and ambiguity are not in his repertoire ... Lopez\'s gracious spiritualism, his drive to reconnect the cultural and the natural, comes to look less like piety and more like an alarm call.
