Toward Antarctica

Author: Elizabeth Bradfield
Publisher: Red Hen Press
ISBN: 1597098264
Category : Travel
Languages : en
Pages : 223

Book Description
“The most original piece of travel writing about the Antarctic region I have read in years . . . Bradfield is a literary tour guide in the best sense.” —Elizabeth Leane, author of Antarctica in Fiction: Imaginative Narratives of the Far South A poet and a naturalist, Elizabeth Bradfield documents and examines her work as a guide on ships in Antarctica through poetry, prose, and photographs, offering an incisive insider’s vision that challenges traditional tropes of The Last Continent. Inspired by haibun, a stylistic form of Japanese poetry invented by seventeenth-century poet Matsuo Basho to chronicle his journeys in remote Japan, Bradfield uses photographs, compressed prose, and short poems to examine our relationship to remoteness, discovery, expertise, awe, labor, temporary societies, “pure” landscapes, and tourism’s service economy. Antarctica was the focus of Bradfield’s Approaching Ice, written before she had set foot on the continent; now Toward Antarctica furthers her investigation with boots on the ground. A complicated love letter, Toward Antarctica offers a unique view of one of the world’s most iconic wild places. Like having a poet’s behind-the-scenes tour of a natural history museum . . . the exquisite landscape and wildlife come into vivid view; so does the gutsy work and responsibility of being a naturalist guide.” —Alison Hawthorne Deming, author of Zoologies: On Animals and the Human Spirit

Beyond the Barrier

Author: Eugene Rodgers
Publisher: Naval Institute Press
ISBN: 1612511880
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 589

Book Description
When this book originally appeared in 1990, it was hailed as an important new work because of the author's access to Adm. Richard E. Byrd's just-released private papers. Previous books on the legendary polar explorer had to rely on sources subject to the admiral's vigilant censorship or the control of his heirs and friends. With this study Eugene Rodgers provides a scrupulously honest and objective account of Byrd's 1929 expedition to Antarctica. Without discrediting the expedition's success or Byrd's leadership, Rodgers shows that the admiral was not the saintly hero he and the press depicted. Nor was the expedition without its problems. Interviews with surviving members of the expedition together with a wealth of other new material indicate that Byrd, contrary to his claims, was not a good navigator--his pilots usually had to find their way by dead reckoning--and that he was not on the actual flight that discovered Marie Byrd Land. The book further reveals a crisis over drunkenness among the men (including Byrd), the admiral's fear of mutiny, and his rewriting of news stories from the pole to embellish his own image.

Below the Convergence

Author: Alan Gurney
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 9780393329049
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 338

Book Description
This wonderfully written book tells of the first Herculean expeditions to Antarctica, from astronomer Edmond Halley's 1699 voyage in the Paramore to the sealer John Balleny's 1839 excursion in the Eliza Scott, all in search of land, glory, fur, science, and profit. Life was harsh: crews had poor provisions and inadequate clothing, and scurvy was a constant threat. With unreliable--often homemade--charts, these intrepid explorers sailed in the stormy waters of the Southern Ocean below the Convergence, that sea frontier marking the boundary between the freezing Antarctic waters and the warmer sub-Antarctic seas. These men were the first to discover and exploit a new continent, which was not the verdant southern island they had imagined but an inhospitable expanse of rock and ice, ringed by pack ice and icebergs: Antarctica.

The Ice

Author: Stephen J. Pyne
Publisher: University of Washington Press
ISBN: 0295805234
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 466

Book Description
“The Ice is a compilation of more about ice than you knew you wanted to know, yet sheer compelling significance holds attention page by page. . . . Pyne conveys a view of Antarctica that interweaves physical science with humanistic inquiry and perception. His audacity as well as his presentation warrant admiration, for the implications of The Ice are vast.”—New York Times Book Review

Antarctica

Author: Gabrielle Walker
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
ISBN: 0547536976
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 463

Book Description
The acclaimed science writer presents a wide-ranging exploration of Antarctica’s history, nature, and global significance in this “rollicking good read” (Kirkus). From the early expeditions of Ernest Shackleton to David Attenborough’s documentary series Frozen Planet, the continent of Antarctica has captured the world’s imagination. After the Antarctic Treaty of 1961, decades of scientific research revealed the true extent of its many mysteries. Now former Nature magazine staff writer Gabrielle Walker tells the full story of Antarctica—from its fascinating history to its uncertain future and the international teams of researchers who brave its forbidding climate. Drawing on her broad travels across the continent, Walker weaves all the significant threads of life on the vast ice sheet into a multifaceted narrative, illuminating what it really feels like to be there and why it draws so many different kinds of people. She chronicles cutting-edge science experiments, visits to the South Pole, and unsettling portents about our future in an age of global warming. “We are all anxious Antarctic watchers now, and Walker's book is the essential primer.”—The Guardian, UK

Admiral Richard Byrd

Author: Paul Rink
Publisher: Young Voyageur
ISBN: 0760354359
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 226

Book Description
Richard Byrd, survived six months alone at a tiny base in the Antarctic winter. His story is an epic of courage and an indomitable will to live.

Swimming to Antarctica

Author: Lynne Cox
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780753820506
Category : Long distance swimming
Languages : en
Pages : 357

Book Description
At 14, Lynne Cox swam 26 miles from Catalina Island to the California mainland; at 15 and 16, she broke the men's and women's world records for swimming the English Channel - a 33-mile crossing; at 18, she swam the 20-mile Cook Strait between North and South Islands of New Zealand; she was the first to swim the Strait of Magellan, the most treacherous 3-mile stretch of water in the world; she was first to swim the Bering Strait from Alaska to Siberia, thereby opening the U.S.-Soviet border for the first time in 48 years; and the first to swim the Cape of Good Hope (a shark emerged from the kelp, its jaws wide open, and was shot as it headed straight for her). And finally she is the first person to have swum a mile in 0 degree water in Antarctica.Lynne Cox writes about swimming the way Saint-Exupery wrote about flying, and one sees how swimming, like flying, can stretch the wings of the spirit. A thrilling, modest, vivid and lyrical, account of an inspiring life.

Empire Antarctica

Author: Gavin Francis
Publisher: Catapult
ISBN: 1619023407
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 283

Book Description
Gavin Francis fulfilled a lifetime's ambition when he spent fourteen months as the basecamp doctor at Halley, a profoundly isolated British research station on the Caird Coast of Antarctica. So remote, it is said to be easier to evacuate a casualty from the International Space Station than it is to bring someone out of Halley in winter. Antarctica offered a year of unparalleled silence and solitude, with few distractions and a very little human history, but also a rare opportunity to live among emperor penguins, the only species truly at home in he Antarctic. Following Penguins throughout the year –– from a summer of perpetual sunshine to months of winter darkness –– Gavin Francis explores the world of great beauty conjured from the simplest of elements, the hardship of living at 50 c below zero and the unexpected comfort that the penguin community bring. Empire Antarctica is the story of one man and his fascination with the world's loneliest continent, as well as the emperor penguins who weather the winter with him. Combining an evocative narrative with a sublime sensitivity to the natural world, this is travel writing at its very best

Antarctica

Author: Kim Stanley Robinson
Publisher: HarperCollins UK
ISBN: 0007304889
Category : Antarctica
Languages : en
Pages : 582

Book Description
In this novel of the near future, the icy continent will become a battleground between those who seek its natural treasures, and those who would keep this wild land untouched--no matter what the cost. "Robinson's most perfect big novel yet."--"The Washington Post."

Destination

Author: Robert Swan
Publisher: Scholastic
ISBN: 9780439087773
Category : Juvenile Nonfiction
Languages : en
Pages : 48

Book Description
Follows the British adventurer Robert Swan and two other explorers on an exciting and dangerous 900-mile trek to the South Pole, following in the footsteps of Swan's childhood hero, Robert Falcon Scott, who made the journey exactly seventy-four years earlier.