[A] memoir in which a lack of chronology — more a collection of beautifully rendered memory fragments — disrupts any notion that 'background' experiences provide a progression in Ehrlich's life.

The book follows some of that excitement, from exploring never-before-tread Arctic fjords, to observing regenerative agriculture projects in the bush of Mugabe’s troubled Zimbabwe. Ehrlich is drawn again and again to places of extreme weather, extreme natural beauty.

... a lovingly observed account of the lives of people, animals and the landscapes that sustain them, spun together as deftly as a spider’s web, filled with purpose and urgency.

[Ehrlich's] courage is impressive, her experiences no less than extraordinary.

While global warming looms large in it, Unsolaced differs from other books with a climate-change theme in its emphasis on the human costs thereof. For Ehrlich’s friends in Greenland, the disappearance of sea ice equals the disappearance of their way of life and threatens their survival. Ehrlich worries not only about the warming of the earth and the extinction of animals, but also the extinction of cultures.

Erlich ruminates on loss both personally (her husband’s brain cancer) and climatologically, and has a knack for capturing the lives of those she’s met on the road.

This gripping episodic memoir of ranch life and Arctic travels, visionaries and lovers, environmental destruction and loss is a callback, after a dozen titles, to her first book, The Solace of Open Spaces.

In lush, evocative prose, Ehrlich details some breathtakingly perilous journeys, including trekking across a span of polar desolation.