Cold Comfort: Life at the Top of the Map Hardcover - 1998

From the publisher

Temperatures that dive to forty degrees below zero are only part of life in northern Minnesota, according to award-winning writer Barton Sutter. Cold Comfort is his temperamental tribute to the city of Duluth, where bears wander the streets and canoe racks are standard equipment. With humor and passion, Sutter pays homage to the haunting beauty of this lopsided city perched on the shore of Lake Superior, reporting the quirks and joys of daily life in this far-flung outpost and its environs.

"Although the summers are dangerously seductive", Sutter writes, "we are saved, up here on the northern rim, by our crummy economy; by our practical, unfashionable clothes; but most of all by the cold -- the ferocious, unfathomable cold. As Duluthians like to say, it keeps the riffraff out".

These short essays -- first heard on public radio -- will be popular with readers because of Sutter's intriguing stories, sense of humor, and musical language. He extols the pleasures of barbershops, cross-country skiing with a seven-year-old, and living by the great lake. Cold Comfort unlocks the secrets of Duluth, bridging the communal spirit of small-city life and the solitude, silence, and serenity of the wilderness next door.

"As a nation of immigrants, many of us suffer from a vague but painful homesickness we do not understand", he writes. With a voice that is at once sorrowful, soul-searching, and hilarious, Sutter cures that ill by sharing his passion for and faith in his rugged locale. Like a lovers' quarrel with a peculiar place, Cold Comfort conveys deep insights about what makes the place where you live your true home.