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We begin 13 pages of holiday reading with three books on cold and snow for firesiders in the north-and one about the desert for poolsiders in the south
SNOW IN AMERICA. By Bernard Mergen. Smithsonian; 321 pages; $24.95. Sold in Britain by Plymbridge; L19.50.
I MAY BE SOME TIME: ICE AND THE ENGLISH IMAGINATION. By Francis Spufford. Faber; 384 pages; L15.99.
DARK SHADOWS FALLING. By Joe Si son. Jonathan Cape; 208 pages; L15.99. The Mountaineers Books; $24.95
AN it be anxiety about global warming that fuels the present cultural obsession with cold places? How else is the blizzard of snowy images that are whiting out screen and print to be explained? The phenomenon is too widespread to be local, and too lasting to be seasonal. It is two years since the Coen brothers made a star of an upper-midwestern winter in their snowbound black comedy, "Fargo", and the fascination shows no signs of abating. There are ice-capped adventure stories, both imaginary and real, including John Krakauer's best-selling "Into Thin Air" about the deaths of eight climbers on Everest in 1996. On the screen, there are Jean-Jacques Arnaud's "Seven Years in Tibet", Bille August's "Smilla's Feeling for Snow", as well as dysfunctional family dramas, such as Ang Lee's "The Ice Storm" and Bart Freundlich's "The Myth of Fingerprints", in which nature punishes the characters' frosty behaviour with still frostier weather.
Not that these preoccupations are entirely new. As you learn in Bernard Mergen's lively and good-natured "Snow in America", snow has long been an American fixation and all-purpose metaphor. His social-cultural history reaches from the revolutionary and federalist periodswhen climate was a matter of national debate-to the 20th century, when snow came to lie at the heart of urban planning, economic development and leisure pursuits.
Along the way Mr Mergen entertains readers with a nicely anecdotal history of snow gear (in the New York blizzard of 1888, "one boy was seen...