Customer Reviews

Big Dead Place: Inside the Strange and Menacing World of Antarctica

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

'Big Dead Place' is an excellent collection of anecdotes, discussing life on the ice at McMurdo Base and the US South Pole Station. I've long been a fan of the author's website at http://www.bigdeadplace.com/ , so this book went straight on my wishlist once it was available at Amazon, and I've just finished it in time for Midwinter's day.

It's a fantastic book -- very illustrative of how life really goes on on a distant research base, once you get beyond romantic notions of exploration of the wild frontiers. (Like many geek kids, I spent my childhood dreaming of space exploration, and Antarctica is the nearest thing you can get to that right now.) A bonus: it's hilarious, too.

Unfortunately it's far from all good -- there's story after story of moronic bureaucratic edicts emailed from comparatively-sub-tropical Denver, Colorado, ass-covering emails from management on a massive scale, and injuries and asbestos exposures covered up to avoid spoiling 'metrics'.

If you want to get a good idea of what the reality of life exploring the wild frontiers on behalf of the US government is like, this book is an eye-opener. Here's hoping they work out some way to trim some of the bureaucratic fat before that lunar base George Bush keeps talking about is set up...

Having spent 12 years working "on ice" and at every US Station and Ice Breaker, I can say this: Johnson has only scratched the surface on the lunacy, idiocy and buerocratic hell the US Antarctic program has become.

Since Raytheon has taken over as contractor, it's been one laugh after another. HR isn't about helping employees, it's about sticking to the corporate policy with a velvet hammer.

It'll be a fine day when the last Rathioyd leaves Antarcitca, but like the old song by The Who, it'll be "...meet the new boss, just the same as the old boss..."

Having met and known a few Antarctic treaty signatories, I'm sure they're doing a slow spin in their graves.

Big Dead Place is a great combination of Antarctic history and Antarctic humor. It's fascinating to see that a place that could be described as an icy hell has somehow become a beaurocratic one as well. While the tone of the book is lighthearted, with an emphasis on humor, it's clear that Johnson cares deeply about Antarctica. This book gave me a great insight into Antarctica, one that I doubt I could have gotten elsewhere; it did so whilst being funny! If you get this book, you will be entertained and you will learn something about what is probably the strangest place on the planet. I can't recommend it highly enough.

Anyone approaching this book as a sociological critique of human mores in an extreme environment is looking for a different book. Oh, there's plenty of sociology, plenty of critique, and plenty examples of human mores in an extreme environment; but these are the simple byproduct of an intelligent man's opening his eyes and recording what he sees as an Antarctic contract/wage worker.

On the bounds of journalism, not quite Gonzo, not quite straight reportage, the author manages to weave enough Antarctic lore, daily observation, and well-researched history into the narrative, so that the reader is ever mindful of the locale. This alone is a feat of work, for at times one would swear from the corporate shenanigans at the Bottom of the World that this was written as a script for the movie version of "The Office," and rejected for being too real.

The end result--as is the case with most accounts of human bureaucracy in a sublimely inappropriate venue--is hilarity. Think of it as a Monty Python sketch on a continental scale, funded by the American government, subcontracted to an arms manufacturer, and played by a diverse cast of world citizens who can never escape the moral of the story: that things just aren't fair.

Our years in McMurdo mostly overlapped although our jobs did not.

I can verify at least 1/2 of the book's events are definitely true (saw it), 30% are very likely true (saw immediate evidence), 15% are probably true (saw evidence of evidence) and only about 5% are beyond my knowledge.

A clear example proving high levels of eductation do not necessarily lead to utopian existence.

Having disparaged the place, it is amazing how many people become addicted to the place including the book's author and myself.

For every scientist stationed in Antarctica, there are five support crew including dish washers and trash men. Luckily for us the author, Nicholas Johnson, was among them.

Johnson's story is an insider's view of life on the bottom of the planet for those of us who will probably never make it to the South Pole (which may be a good thing, after reading about the frosty welcome tourists get from the "polies"). The author combines hilarious anecdotes about day-to-day life with the history of the continent's exploration. The photo of the Easter Island snowman alone is worth the price of the book.

Antarctica has assumed an aura of mystique and romance given all the focus on Antarctic explorers and adventure; so it's refreshing to see quite a different - even funny - view of the place which demolishes the mystique and entertains a more realistic, modern view in Big Dead Place: Inside The Strange & Menacing World Of Antarctica. Envision sterile buildings housing nuts - such as a manager who fills his boots with antifreeze - and you have an idea of the odd personalities and non-heroic moments permeating the wonderful read which is Big Dead Place.

I worked with Nick Johnson in Antarctica. He has a very great (albeit jaundiced) sense of humor. Loved working with him and he pretty much gets to the gist of this part of corporate America. Started to sound like whining at the end. But we all know, Nick, your last gig was pretty good, wasn't it?

This is a very funny book, with lots of fascinating anecdotes from an unusual social environment.

Its main drawback is that that's all it is: a grab-bag of anecdotes that jumps around randomly in time, place, and topic with no discernible logic.

I enjoyed this book very much and highly recommend it. The topic of the book corresponded with a lifelong interest in the subject of polar exploration and adventure. This begun with the first book I read as a child called the Iceberg Hermit. Here the froze wasteland stuck in my mind by the image of a black dot in white nothingness, a whaling ship trapped in the ice or the Norwegian ship Fram floating at the poles, always left me with a sublime haunted feeling. What intrigues me about Antarctica is not just the place but man's relation to it and this book captures that dynamic in a unique manner. Amongst the hyperbole of its conquest and the grandeur of its submission to American administration, Nick Johnson tells another story surrounding and mitigating human experience with extreme nature. This book placed me in a reality of other worldly proportions framed, exacted and then confounded by all sorts of conditions and conventions of human nature. The author weaves the everyday oddity of maintaining a base station in absolute unsustainability to the dramatic historical process it took to get there. The intricacy of a science mission, a deep probe of human consciousness unfolds through a series of technicalities, flaws and hang-ups associated with human enterprising. Not belittling the American undertaking, I liked his descriptions of the dramatics and antics of this perplexed human ontology beset by extremes and awkward dealings exposing weakness in corporate hierarchy and scientific self-understanding. It offers insight and critique into officialdom, protocol and systematic rational hegemony. The author refined a dialectic of sublimity and banality at the South Pole and captured the cocktail that makes up its history between human ego, forgetfulness, victimization and petty bourgeois encounters. Speaking of cocktails, they were allowed to drink at the station! So many funny stories about their parties and hangovers the next day were told. I still have to laugh at the image of the author with a hangover collecting garbage in the morning on the forbidden continent. I would have loved to been there with those guys and this book enabled me to experience some of that crazy reality. I enjoyed this book from a number of different perspectives. It was fun and critical without being judgmental. I loved the narrative of everyday life punctuated by the late 19thcentury attempt to achieve human grandeur of getting to the south pole against the contemporary petty bourgeoisie of its beachhead administration: Between the complex marvel of maintaining this station and boobus Americanus personal, corporate and institutional absurdities. A clash developed between advanced engineering, pioneering and big hair Denver suburbia. It is a great firsthand description of living there, with all the wonderful eccentricities revealed. Since the movie The Thing, I desired to understand the complex and mundane survival of living on an ice station in Antarctica. I can vividly recall the second scene of the movie showing the hermitic social activity of ping pong playing, T.V. watching, book reading, computer working and alien transmutation within confined quarters on the continent of the South Pole. I found the circumstances similar to space travel and again asked the same question with the movie Alien. From Amundsen, Shackleton to Lovecraft and Carpenter, I searched for information that would tell this odd reality of living in an unsustainable environment. I dated a Norwegian girl and immersed myself in unlocking the cultural psychology that lead to their success in taking the Pole. I visited the Fram many times and imagined every detail of its quest and tried to fathom the mindset that took both Poles. Big Dead Place intricately fulfills my specific wonder and psychological inquiry on a number of fronts, capturing the complexity of maintaining such an extreme base station that brings out the best and the worst of human nature. In this inhospitable world, the author tells the routine of work and protocol of management and safety. There are so many funny stories told with ingenuity generating laughter and serious contemplation often at the same time. I like the juxtapositions brought out between American management, scientific paradigms and primitive psychological disposition. What is there to discover at the South Pole but infinite cosmological regress; a massive circle of climatic changes and atmospheric regenerations. No spaceship sunk in the ice, just closed reductive paradigms of naturalism and materialism that believe in a prime mover of peering deep into space and ice seemingly offering us the key to the universe. A lot of ideology is disseminated in this book within a phenomenology of the real. No doubt, American innovation and ethics has been second to none since the great carrier battles of the Pacific but regression is clearly seen on the South Pole that questions mission status on a number of fronts. Anyway, I had fun with this book and I got serious data to use in my life. I certainly encourage everyone to read the Big Dead Place. I look forward to reading more from this author in the not too distant future. I am for your next book Nick Johnson.