Book Review

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Book Review | The Journal of American History, 86.1 | The History Cooperative

Snow in America. By Bernard Mergen. (Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1997. xxii, 321 pp. $24.95, isbn 0-56098-780-4.)

Bernard Mergen's Snow in America is a wonderful book whose merits, like the qualities of snow he describes so meticulously, may be lost on scholars looking for (or embarrassed by) a social historical narrative of American ideas about and responses to snow. So we should be clear: this is not a history. It is, rather, an album of acute, literate observation, a model for looking. Intentionally, the book mimics characteristics of its subject. The text sparkles with Mergen's love of language far beyond its smart play with unavoidable snowy puns (anticipating readers' sniffy responses). Like the surprising diminutive beauty of a perfect snowflake, delightful words, old and new, appear here: firnification, haruspical, ablation, orismology. Like the many taxonomies of snow he explores—from those described by various snow sciences, to those of amateur sketchers and photographers, painters, skiers, snow removal experts, and poets—the text is a subtly patterned accumulation of insight, narrative, and information that allows us to see the ways in which American—including Canadian—culture and nature speak to and reflect upon each other through the medium of snow. . . .

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