Welcome To The Goddamn Ice Cube

A rich and revelatory memoir of a young woman reclaiming her courage in the stark landscapes of the north. By the time Blair Braverman was eighteen, she had left her home in California, moved to arctic Norway to learn to drive sled dogs, and found work as a tour guide on a glacier in Alaska. Determined to carve out a life as a “tough girl”—a young woman who confronts danger without apology—she slowly developed the strength and resilience the landscape demanded of her. By turns funny and sobering, bold and tender, Welcome to the Goddamn Ice Cube brilliantly recounts Braverman’s adventures in Norway and Alaska. Settling into her new surroundings, Braverman was often terrified that she would lose control of her dog team and crash her sled, or be attacked by a polar bear, or get lost on the tundra. Above all, she worried that, unlike the other, gutsier people alongside her, she wasn’t cut out for life on the frontier. But no matter how out of place she felt, one thing was clear: she was hooked on the North. On the brink of adulthood, Braverman was determined to prove that her fears did not define her—and so she resolved to embrace the wilderness and make it her own. Assured, honest, and lyrical, Welcome to the Goddamn Ice Cube paints a powerful portrait of self-reliance in the face of extraordinary circumstance. Braverman endures physical exhaustion, survives being buried alive in an ice cave, and drives her dogs through a whiteout blizzard to escape crooked police. Through it all, she grapples with love and violence—navigating a grievous relationship with a fellow musher, and adapting to the expectations of her Norwegian neighbors—as she negotiates the complex demands of being a young woman in a man’s land. Weaving fast-paced adventure writing and ethnographic journalism with elegantly wrought reflections on identity, Welcome to the Goddamn Ice Cube captures the triumphs and the perils of Braverman’s journey to self-discovery and independence in a landscape that is as beautiful as it is unforgiving.

The American Adrenaline Narrative considers the nature of perilous outdoor adventure tales, their gendered biases, and how they simultaneously promote and hinder ecological sustainability. To explore these themes, Kristin J. Jacobson defines and compares adrenaline narratives by a range of American authors published after the first Earth Day in 1970, a time frame selected as a watershed moment for the contemporary American environmental movement. The forty-plus years since that day also mark the rise in the popularity and marketing of many things as “extreme,” including sports, jobs, travel, beverages, gum, makeovers, laundry detergent, and even the environmental movement itself. Jacobson maps the American eco-imagination via adrenaline narratives, grounding them in the traditional literary practice of close reading analysis and in ecofeminism. She surveys a range of popular and lesser-known primary texts by American authors, including best-selling books, such as Jon Krakauer’s Into Thin Air and Aron Ralston’s Between a Rock and a Hard Place, and lesser-known texts, such as Patricia C. McCairen’s Canyon Solitude, Eddy L. Harris’s Mississippi Solo, and Stacy Allison’s Beyond the Limits. She also discusses such narratives as they appear in print and online articles and magazines, feature-length and short films, television shows, amateur videos, social networking site posts, fiction, advertising, and blogs. Jacobson contends that these stories constitute a distinctive genre because—unlike traditional nature, travel, and sports writing— adrenaline narratives sustain heightened risk or the element of the “extreme” within a natural setting. Additionally, these narratives provide important insight into the American environmental imagination’s connection to masculinity and adventure—knowledge that helps us grasp the current climate crisis and how narrative understanding provides a needed intervention.

Below Freezing is a unique assemblage of scientific fact, newspaper reports, and excerpts from novels, short stories, nonfiction, history, creative nonfiction, and poetry--a commonplace book for our era of altering climate.

This book is about memory, the power of memory, the weight of memory, the presence of memory. Its about how memory works, and its about how memory moves and shapes us, profoundly and deeply, every moment of every day. Most of all, however, its about how memory points us to some questions that, try as we might, we cannot elude altogether, questions that force us to confront the very nature of existence. Suppose that no one, no one at all, remembered us? Suppose that no one, no one at all, remembered the universe? How can we make sense of a world that one day will be utterly gone and forgotten? Memory makes us speak of things we may not want to accept or understand, thrusts us into things lying beyond what we can picture, imagine, or know. Twisting itself around our heart and burrowing into our soul, memory stretches us. It stretches us to ponder purpose, it stretches us to consider meaning. Memory forces us to think about how unbearably complex we, and this bewildering world, can be if nothing precedes or follows them. Memory opens our heart to God.

An investigation into the mental health crisis affecting young adults today, and an impassioned argument for creating learning environments characterized both by compassion and challenge. Alarming statistics in recent years indicate that mental health problems like depression and anxiety have been skyrocketing among youth. To identify solutions, psychologist and professor Sarah Rose Cavanagh interviews a roster of experts across the country who are dedicating their lives to working with young people to help them actualize their goals, and highlights voices of college students from a range of diverse backgrounds. Cavanagh also brings the reader on an invigorating tour of pedagogical, neuroscientific, and psychological research on mental health—one that involves her own personal journey from panic to equilibrium. The result of these combined sources of inquiry indicates that to support youth mental health, we must create what Cavanagh calls compassionate challenge— first, we need to cultivate learning and living environments characterized by compassion, and then, we need to guide our youth into practices that encourage challenge, helping them face their fears in an encouraging, safe, and even playful way. Mind over Monsters is a must-read for teachers, administrators, parents, and young people themselves.

In When Everything Beyond the Walls Is Wild, Lilace Mellin Guignard draws from emblematic moments and relationships in her own life to explore issues of gender, recreation, and environmental conservation. Born into a suburban family, Guignard wanted to get up close and personal with iconic American landscapes, but social pressures and cautionary tales told her that these spaces were not meant for her as a woman. Reflecting on the ways our culture socializes women to remain indoors, Guignard shares her own struggles with finding her place outdoors. Refusing to stay indoors and “safe,” Guignard drove cross-country with her dog, worked as a river guide, and set out to climb Mount Whitney. She recounts navigating outdoor interactions with male friends and strangers that range from wonderful to awkward to frightening. Now that she is settled with her own family, Guignard writes about how it is still more difficult for women than men to prioritize outdoor recreation time. These stories expose how cultural messages about women shape their experiences and interactions when backpacking, paddling, rock climbing, and bicycling. They broaden readers’ notions of what adventure is, what places are considered wild and worth our care, and what types of people enjoy the outdoors. Drawing upon the art of the memoir—and informed by analysis from women’s studies and ecological literature—Guignard makes an impassioned case for why women and marginalized members of society should have the opportunity to experience nature. The self-reliance and connection with the natural world that outdoor recreation fosters are qualities we all need in order to do the work required by the environmental challenges ahead.

Guy and Laura Waterman spent a lifetime reflecting on and writing about the mountains of the Northeast. The Waterman Fund seeks to further their legacy of stewardship through an annual essay contest that celebrates and explores issues of wilderness, wildness, and humanity. Since 2008, the Waterman Fund has partnered with the journal Appalachia in seeking out new and emerging voices on these subjects, and in publishing the winning essay in the journal. Part of the contest's mission is to find and support such emerging writers, and a number of them have gone on to publish other work in Appalachia or their own books. The contest has succeeded admirably in fulfilling its mission: new writers have brought fresh perspectives to these timeless issues of wilderness and wildness. In New Wilderness Voices these winning essays are collected for the first time, along with the best runners-up. Together, they make up an important and celebratory addition to the growing body of environmental literature, and shed new light on our wild spaces.