Snow Sense

Book which focuses on teaching backcountry travellers to recognize, evaluate, and avoid avalanche hazards by gathering available key information and clues from the snowpack, weather, and terrain.

The fifth edition of a best-selling classic. Snow Sense is the leading primer on how to avoid getting caught in an avalanche. Written by the experts, Snow Sense focuses on the critical terrain, snowpack, weather, and human factors that allow avalanche accidents to happen. Safe travel procedures, decision-making strategies, and rescue techniques are also covered in this authoritative, straightforward guide. A must-have for anyone who works or plays in avalanche country.

A Time Best Book of the Year · An Entertainment Weekly Best Book of the Year · A People Best Book of the Year · Winner of the CWA Silver Dagger Award · A Finalist for the Edgar Award for Best Mystery Novel First published in 1992, Peter Høeg's Smilla's Sense of Snow instantly became an international sensation. When caustic Smilla Jaspersen discovers that her neighbor--a neglected six-year-old boy, and possibly her only friend--has died in a tragic accident, a peculiar intuition tells her it was murder. Unpredictable to the last page, Smilla's Sense of Snow is one of the most beautifully written and original crime stories of our time, a new classic.

Novelist and cultural commentator C.P. Snow was a large and controversial presence in his lifetime but his work has been largely neglected since his death in 1980. This is the first 21st-century book to offer a clear, informed and sympathetic survey of all his novels and major non-fiction books and to affirm their importance for the world today.

Combining on–the–slopes experience with off–trail research, author Charlie English follows in the footsteps of the Romantic poets across the Alps, learns how to build igloos with the Inuit on Baffin Island, examines snow–patches in the Cairngorms to detect signs of global warming, and tests his mettle on some of the most perilous peaks on Earth. Along the way, he meets up with a flurry of fellow enthusiasts, from avalanche survivors and resort operators to climate scientists and champion skiers. English is obsessed with snow, and has collected for our enjoyment an amazing array of not–so–random facts about the hexagonal substance that fills the human imagination with wonder. In this "snow handbook," he describes how snow is created, how to build an igloo, how avalanches occur, and (more importantly) how to survive an avalanche. His glossary is filled with snow terms that will delight, such as "coulior," "hoarfrost," "firn," and "sastrugi." Fresh and fun and infused with the adrenaline of adventure, The Snow Tourist is a fascinating account of one man's pilgrimage through the world's blanketed fields, ice–capped rooftops, cozy igloos, and snow–covered mountain peaks.

The condition of modernity springs from that tension between science and the humanities that had its roots in the Enlightenment but reached its full flowering with the rise of twentieth-century technology. It manifests itself most notably in the crisis of individuality that is generated by the nexus of science, literature, and politics, one that challenges each of us to find a way of balancing our personal identities between our public and private selves in an otherwise estranging world. This challenge, which can only be expressed as "the struggle of modernity," perhaps finds no better expression than in C. P. Snow. In his career as novelist, scientist, and civil servant, C. P. Snow (1905-1980) attempted to bridge the disparate worlds of modern science and the humanities. While Snow is often regarded as a late-Victorian liberal who has little to say about the modernist period in which he lived and wrote, de la Mothe challenges this judgment, reassessing Snow's place in twentieth-century thought. He argues that Snow's life and writings—most notably his Strangers and Brothers sequence of novels and his provocative thesis in The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution—reflect a persistent struggle with the nature of modernity. They manifest Snow's belief that science and technology were at the center of modern life.