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Winter: Five Windows on the Season
Adam Gopnik
#UE8512
Paperback, 256 pages; 2011
$19.95
 Members' Price: $16.96
Monet gets from the Japanese print a new infatuation with pure white-- not a white that's laid down unvaryingly with single brushstrokes, but instead a white that is made up kaleidoscopically of tiny touches of prismatic colour….In the hands of Monet and Sisley and even the less gifted Pissarro, winter becomes another kind of spring, a spring for aesthetes who find April's green too common, but providing the same emotional lift of hope, the same pleasure of serene, unfolding slowness: the slow weight of frost, the chromatic varnishing of snow on the boughs of the chestnut tree, the still dawn scene, the semi-frozen river.
Generally, I do not like cold weather, but even I reveled joyfully in Adam Gopnik's five captivating essays (lecture transcripts, actually) about "why winter, a season long seen as a sign of nature's withdrawal from grace, has become for us a time of human warmth." Exploring the modern concept of winter--as shaped by artists, poets, composers, writers, explorers, scientists, and others--Gopnik's erudite prose enlightens and entertains, inspiring a cozy new appreciation for the coldest season.
(CH)
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