Polar Dance: Born of the North Wind

From Library Journal
An award-winning nature photographer, Mangelsen followed polar bears for eight years to collect the images featured here, over 250 exquisite color photographs that take the reader on a year-long journey through the Arctic.The accompanying text, by Canadian naturalist Bruemmer, chronicles a year in the life of a mother polar bear and her cubs and a young male bear as they experience the changing seasons in their Arctic wilderness habitat. The book's focus is on the polar bear but is balanced with images of walruses, seals, foxes, birds, characteristic vegetation, and the seasonally changing landscape. Mangelsen has surpassed his goal of creating a "beautiful picture book on bears," as this volume also presents a learning forum for those who seek an understanding of the Arctic but are unlikely to travel there. Sitting down with this book is an absorbing experience that will leave the reader with a new respect and admiration for the Arctic and its inhabitants. Highly recommended.?Deborah Emerson, Monroe Community Coll., Rochester, N.Y.Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist
Mangelsen is a well-known nature photographer, and in Polar Dance, he has produced what is probably the definitive collection of images of polar bears. These "ice bears" spend most of their lives in a land of snow and ice (the polar summer lasts mere weeks), and Mangelsen's evocative photos of white bears covered in snow, lying spread-eagled on pack ice, or swimming among ice floes give the reader a sense of this harsh habitat. Bruemmer's text is a factual account of arctic ecology and the niche the polar bear fills in this surprisingly rich ecosystem, coupled with two interspersed, parallel stories covering a year in the lives of a lone male bear and a female bear with two cubs. The text is informative, but a bibliography or lists of citations would have greatly added to its value as a reference source. This lush coffee-table book is recommended for libraries with large natural-history collections. Nancy Bent

From Kirkus Reviews
The polar bear, the largest land carnivore, ranges over some five million miles of snow-covered northern land and frozen sea. The often ferocious weather of the Arctic, its remoteness, and the bear's own fierce reputation have conspired to discourage many photographers from tracking them there. Mangelsen, who spent eight years following and photographing polar bears under extraordinarily daunting conditions, has produced a vivid documentary of their lives, focusing on a female polar bear and her two cubs through the four seasons. The 280 color photographs are both technically accomplished (many, despite the speed with which the bears can move, are beautifully composed) and fascinating: shots of bears drowsing in the snow, navigating icefields, stalking seals, and serenely swimming in Arctic waters. Mangelsen includes photographs of other Arctic wildlife (foxes, geese, walrus, ptarmigan) and some shots of icy landscapes that nicely convey the Arctic's size and harsh beauty. Naturalist and photographer Bruemmer contributes a lively, precise narrative detailing the specifics of a polar bear's life. A handsome, eye-opening work. -- Copyright ©1997, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Midwest Book Review
The great ice bear of the Far North follows seasonal and predictable patterns: in autumn, from waiting on the shore for the Hudson Bay to freeze, to continuing their pilgrimage north in summer in search of evanescent ice. Readers of Polar Dance will set out on a journey to the Arctic with the exquisite photography of Thomas Mangelsen as they engage in Fred Bruemmer's story of a mother polar bear and her two cubs, and a lone male bear through a complete revolution of seasons. This amazing account captures the vast habitat of these magnificent creatures, along with detailed descriptions of flora and fauna native to the polar bears' domain. Also included are the Inuit, and how both man and beast have learned to live off land that has been considered inhospitable to all forms of life. Polar Dance is a unique and valuable body of work.

From Independent Publisher
In the vast shadowed winterscape of frozen seas and ice-capped shores the polar bears of the high Arctic, huge and lumbering, have evolved suited to a harsh environment. Through the stark, near-surreal photographs of biologist/photographer Mangelsen, and the moving text of Canadian naturalist Bruemmer, we are caught up in the singular roaming for birthing and survival of a female and her two cubs, a lone male, and an arctic fox often dependent on a bear's leftover kill for sustenance. In mid-October the sun will set on this most northern place, not rising again for four months. It leaves an eerie "pallid world of grays and blacks and velvety blues and glints of milky moonlight upon the ice." The unusual gestation cycle of the female polar bear is followed as she wends her way northward to her place of birth where she will carve a snow den, fasting without food or water for eight months. She and the cubs she will give birth to are sustained on the blubber she has carefully acquired beforehand. Her cubs will be with her for at least a couple of years, learning how to forage for seals, and to respond to their keen olfactory sense that alerts them to distant food, other bears, and danger. Manglesen's photos are hauntingly beautiful. His bears and birds and foxes against an unremitting unpeopled horizon and vast spaces of primitive space are mesmerizing; as is the graphic detail of life in the form of a mother plodding ice floes trailed by her two tiny cubs; a bare seven-pound arctic fox covered in dense white fur in a snowstorm; a snowy owl perched on a dome of ice in a vast nothing world. The story holds one to the page in the best tradition of tale-telling. Bruemmer has lived long with the Inuit. He knows the lure, the land, the habits of creatures who not only survive, but thrive, in this place beyond urban living. His prose is magical, capturing the moods of an icy world and its inhabitants, as Mangelsen stills time for us graphically. Scientific fact and seductive lure of the little-known are intimately connected here in a remarkable book.


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