Winter: Five Windows on the Season

In this ruminative collection, Gopnik offers five essays on winter%E2%80%94exploring it as season and idea, elemental force and cultural influence. The New Yorker staff writer and author of Paris to the Moon composed these pieces for the 50th anniversary of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation's Massey Lectures. He acknowledges that "chapters are meant to sound vocal" and rough edges have been left in place. Readers will find pleasures of the serendipitous variety, including introductions to Wilson "Snowflake" Bentley, the underground architect Vincent Ponte, and the engineers who helped developed central heating. Gopnik's round-the-world tour of "romantic winter" covers more than 200 years in art, music, poetry, literature, and theology. In "Radical Winter," he describes the absurd courage of the men who raced for glory at the North and South Poles; in "Recreational Winter," he untangles the motley origins of ice hockey. Though the prose moves slowly at times, Gopnik leavens dense material with humor, and makes unwieldy concepts accessible through modern-day comparisons (consider Dickens the Francis Ford Coppola of his day). In the end, the lectures serve as Gopnik's equivalent to a Playmate's "turn-ons and turn-offs." That being the case, we'd call him a worthy Mr. December. (Sept.)