Customer Reviews

Antarctica: Exploring the Extreme: 400 Years of Adventure

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Antarctica represents for many the final frontier on a greatly explored Earth. Yet for such an unknown land (Terra Incognita) it has exerted a strong pull on the imagination of adventurers and explorers for hundreds of years. Some of the stories are not well known, others are exhaustively chronicles, such as explorations by Byrd and Shackelford. Landis takes an overview position, presenting stories briefly, to try and weave a tapestry of exploration, adventure and danger. As a result, some of the stories seem to get the short shrift, but an exhaustive history of the continent is not the objective. It is an overview exploration that she is getting at, written by one who has obviously fallen in love with the continent. It's a great starting off point for those who are interested or falling in love with Antarctica.

But the book suffers from a major flaw that so many other books on Antarctica suffer - the lack of maps and illustration. She takes great pains to describe details of trips, discoveries, and pushes towards the pole, yet there is only a rough map of explorations (which does not neatly correspond with what is being written about) and one somewhat detailed map inside the cover, which is inadequate and does not even show the entire continent. I found myself frustrated and turning to other atlases to try and put her descriptions into real life context. It keeps the book from really reaching some of its potential.

Also, in the last chapter of the book, Landis goes on to describe the animal life of Antarctica, which is very good. But it quickly gets boring and tedious with no illustration of the animals she is describing. Again, to differentiate between the various types of penguins or seals would be helpful to see what is being written about. Instead we are forced to work with the mind's eye, which is a sin when trying to introduce the wonder and diversity of life.

These deficiencies keep a good book from being a great book. Still, worth giving a chance, if nothing else that to give yourself a glimpse into an area many of us yearn for, but few will ever get to see.

400 years of exploration history and adventure are charted in this survey of various attempts to reach the South Pole. From early whaling expeditions and attempts to chart the magnetic south pole to later explorations for wildlife studies and resource management, this provides an excellent coverage of various Antarctic expeditions over the decades.

This small book covers every successful and some unsuccessful attempts to conquer the southern continent. It covers the entire period, from captain Cooks first sightings of ice around Antarctica through to the present where Antarcticas frigid landscape is dotted with international stations. This is a thorough investigation of the worlds attempts to conquer a barren frigid continent, from attaining the `grail' of the South Pole to charting the landscape of Mt. Erebus. A good account and an excellent overview.

Separate sections detail exploration of the various seas(Weddel and Ross) as well as the continents wildlife and resources.

Landis does a wonderful job of providing a grand historical context for the impact of Antarctica on human thought and exploration. She begins in ancient Greece and follows the development of the "world views" of succeeding civilizations, until the birth of the idea of Antarctica.

Into this context she places the intrepid men who sailed out and sought this legendary land since the 1500s. Most interesting is her depiction of the great explorers for the rogues gallery they were, as opposed to the sanitized versions from history books. Many were in league with the monarchy of their country seizing plunder from their enemies and seeking to extend the influence of the monarchs they served.

The entire book is worth buying for the beautifully crafted first part which delivers a historical, philosophical and at the same time very personal context for understanding the role Antarctica has played through the ages.

This book is a compendium of the history, exploration, wildlife, geology etc. of Antarctica. As such it is well structured and you needn't read it from end to end -- you could focus on explorations, for example, or read descriptions of the types of seals and penguins. There is even a page near the end listing travel agencies that sponsor trips. This last makes me think the book is designed as a kind of primer for people interested in Antarctica as a destination. It also makes a good, if short, reference to have on the shelf if you suddenly can't remember who discovered the Antarctic Peninsula or the dates of treaties.

However, for true fans of exploration acounts, note that there is nothing new here, and the stories of individual journeys are quite brief. The author also has no opinions or new scholarship on offer -- the tone is journalistic and rather cold -- except for one instance, which is mentioning over and over the awful whale and seal killing in the 19th century. I think it is very bad scholarship to "PC the past," when clearly people of an earlier period can't be held to the same standards we have today for treatment of the environment, because they simply didn't know, as we do now, what the impacts of their actions might be. (And knowing hasn't really made us better stewards either.)

One other problem is that there is one tiny map in the front of the book, very difficult to read, and so the journeys described throughout are hard to visualize -- a series of maps would have been more helpful than the murky, featureless photographs that are used to head up each chapter.