New review up at The New Republic:
When Blair Braverman enrolled at age 18 in a Norwegian “folk school”—a self-guided education program with the “distinctly Scandinavian” aim of fostering “uncomfortable self-awareness”—she wanted to learn how to dogsled. From an early age, Braverman, a child of Southern California, had been transfixed by the idea of the far north, of skiing toward the top of the world in the bracing cold, with just reindeer and the Northern Lights to guide her. Her teacher at the folk school had his teenage charges jump into a frigid polar river so that, by learning to force their ice-numbed limbs into action, they would be prepared to save themselves. It’s the only wisdom he had to impart, he later told Braverman: “how to be cold,” by which he meant, “How to live.”
