"This excellent book makes permafrost a lot more exciting than one might imagine it possibly could be, literally bringing the topic to life. Pey-Yi Chu gives the inanimate permafrost agency in these pages."
Robert Orttung, Eurasian Geography and Economics, Vol. 62
"The life of ‘permafrost’ has generated the material for a fine, well-researched, clearly-argued, and deeply-thoughtful book."
David Moon, University of York, Slavonic and East European Review
"I found this book very informative. The quality is greatly enhanced by the author’s style, which makes the book easy to read. It is illustrated by maps and diagrams from former researchers which well support the arguments of the author. The research behind the study was built on a forceful combination of scholarly literature, archival sources and powerful storytelling that brought permafrost to life, while also employing most recent scientific findings on global climate change.
Fruzsina Gresina, Eötvös Loránd University, Hungarian Geographical Bulletin
"Throughout the book, Chu does a wonderful job of describing the politics and other cultural factors informing scientists’ study of permafrost."
Ryan Tucker Jones, University of Oregon, Canadian-American Slavic Studies
"The science of permafrost is here embedded within a historical, social, and cultural context, providing a new outlook that would not otherwise be available given the literature written by geoscientists alone. This book is a thorough compendium on the ‘life’ of permafrost, providing insights that build from the history of earth sciences."
R. A. Delgado Jr., National Science Foundation, CHOICE
"Pey-Yi Chu’s brilliantly written book on the hitherto unexplored history of permafrost in Soviet and Russian science is very timely. By investigating the scientific debates and developments around the phenomenon from a history of science perspective, she helps us go beyond the dominant image of permafrost as hostile. As she embeds the story of permafrost into a historical context, she points to the complex entanglements of science, culture, politics and history in Russia and the Soviet Union."
Katja Doose, University of Fribourg, Cahiers du monde russe
"By situating frozen earth research in the cultures that created and shaped it, Chu demonstrates that the way frozen earth science was used and promoted significantly affected the way frozen earth was conceived, studied, and named. She offers an engaging look at an understudied topic and makes an important contribution to the wider history of science in the USSR and on a global scale."
Samantha Lomb, Dotsent, Vyatka State University, Europe-Asia Studies
"Fascinating, engagingly written, and deeply researched. I cannot imagine a timelier book. As the frozen earth thaws around us, Pey-Yi Chu examines how politics, science, and the environment came together to create the highly contested concept of permafrost and just how impermanent it might be."
Nicholas B. Breyfogle, Associate Professor of History, The Ohio State University
"The Life of Permafrost is scholarship of the highest standard. Pey-Yi Chu engages with an interesting and hitherto little studied area in the English language, placing it effectively within relevant literatures. Well written and accessible for interested readers, this book is a pleasure to read and will resonate with a range of scholarly audiences."
Jonathan Oldfield, Reader in Russian Environmental Studies, University of Birmingham
"The Life of Permafrost is, above all, a study on the history of permafrost research via a focus on the development of relevant terminology. Well versed in the scholarly literature and archival sources, Pey-Yi Chu takes an original approach both to a phenomenon which is difficult to detect in nature and to the history of the development of knowledge about it."
Erki Tammiksaar, Senior Research Fellow in History in Geography, University of Tartu
"Making extensive use of both archival and published sources, Chu has impressively written an extremely scholarly book on an original topic which, in the age of climate change, has attained new relevance. An important contribution to the literature, The Life of Permafrost will appeal to students specializing in the fields of environmental history, history of science, and Russian studies."
Denis Shaw, Honorary Senior Research Fellow, , University of Birmingham
