Barry Lopez spent five years going north — on the ice with Inuit and Iñupiat hunters, on ships, in camps with biologists — and came back with the book that made his name. It won the National Book Award in 1986. It’s not a trip report. He works the whole place at once: light, and how it plays tricks on a man’s sense of distance; muskoxen, polar bears, narwhals, and the ringed seal that everything up there eats; the Thule people who crossed the top of the continent; then the string of Europeans who sailed into that country with the wrong maps in their heads and mostly died of it. Underneath all of it is one question, which is what a landscape asks of you and whether you have the manners to answer. He’s got a long stretch on Ellesmere, on ice so far north the light doesn’t behave, and it’s some of the best writing anybody’s done about the Arctic.