For Robert Perkins, whose unique and intimate travel narratives have aired often on PBS, arctic travel has become a way to test his ties to humanity. In Talking to Angels, Perkins records not only travels to the far north but also urgent journeys of a different kind.

In 1968, at age nineteen, he was institutionalized for a year in a prestigious East Coast psychiatric hospital. "To give you the feeling, I'd hit you hard on the side of the head when you weren't expecting it with a flat board, or a piece of rubber tubing. That would be the short course, the shock of the thing." Talking to Angels begins here, with darkly beautiful, unflinching writing on a cruel year.

For Perkins, solitary arctic travel is a way to test his ties to the rest of humanity. "I lived in a meat locker for two months, something Kafka would have appreciated, at the western edge of the District of Mackenzie, near the Thelon Game Preserve in the heart of the Canadian Northwest Territories." Perkins's writing on the arctic is filled with keen and quirkily humorous observations - on the death dance of caribou and wolf, on the quality of human fear, on ancient human presence in a vast land.