Book review of How to Winter by Kari Leibowitz

When the first white flurries twirl on the frosty air where I live, I am instantly transported back to my 7-year-old self, running off to find my snow boots and mittens. But for many others, winter’s inexorable return means a depressing lack of light, bone-cold mornings and messy roads. Kari Leibowitz’s How to Winter: Harness Your Mindset to Thrive on Cold, Dark, or Difficult Days offers a guide for discovering the magic of the season. 

Leibowitz once counted herself among those who dreaded the onslaught of frigid air, precipitation and fading light, admitting that “as a high school senior, I used to refuse to drive my little brother—a freshman—to class unless he preheated my car to a toasty warmth each morning.” Years later, as a psychologist, she was studying the common diagnosis of seasonal affective disorder. Perplexingly, when she researched northern communities, even ones near the Arctic Circle, her expected findings—a rise in the number of people with depression during the long, dark winters—didn’t pan out. Needing to see it for herself, Leibowitz went to Tromsø, Norway, where, for two months of the year, the sun doesn’t rise. Its inhabitants seemed utterly unfazed: “Once, in a blizzard, I saw a man out for a run in a pair of shorts,” she reports. 

Investigating customs from places as far-flung as Reykjavik, Iceland; the Outer Hebrides off the coast of Scotland; and Tokyo, Leibowitz records the ways people have learned to slow down with the season and embrace what it has to offer. Even the most winter-averse reader will be hard-pressed not to hitch their breath at Leibowitz’s description of sinking into a steaming Japanese bath as the snow begins to fall, or of gazing into a crackling fire as the wind howls outside a traditional thatched cottage in the hinterlands of Scotland. No passport is necessary, however: Peppered with activities and tips for incorporating similar comforting winter practices into your own life, How to Winter is a cozy field guide for not just surviving, but flourishing, in the long dark.