Customer Reviews

End of the Earth: Voyages To Antarctica

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

 

 

This rambling memoir details two trips that the author made to Antarctica with Victor Emmanuel Nature Tours, which specializes in birding trips. Peter Matthiessen beautifully describes several scenes from the Antarctic, which made me long to visit this stark landscape filled with life.

However, the book has no real direction. It reads like a journal, albeit a well-written one with a greater-than-average literacy quotient. The author makes little attempt to introduce any of his fellow-travelers or to show a personal journey of the mind to mirror the Antarctic voyages. Eventually, it just stops, rather than ends. He digresses from accounts of his voyage to describe the adventures of early polar explorers, or to comment on issues such as global warming and whaling. Although these asides are interesting and well-reasoned, there are better sources for each topic.

Birders and armchair travelers may enjoy the descriptions of his wildlife encounters, however.

I've always enjoyed Peter's books, especially the Snow Leopard. I've travelled to many spots all over the world (unfortunately, not to Antarctica yet - although my husband is a pilot on "the Ice"). His prose is a little drier and more austere, but then again, from what I hear from my husband and various travelers to Antarctica (including Shackleton and Scott), that is what Antarctica is like. I do enjoy Peter's environmentalist views, and I don't think there is any irony in the fact he wishes people wouldn't travel to the Ice - at least, not in large, damaging numbers. I think we need people like him to describe these things for us and WHY it is so important to protect these fragile environments. I have heard about many stories of many people - wealthy and otherwise - coming to the South Pole Station and other spots around the continent, stealing the geographic South Pole markers, leaving their trash behind, disrespecting the National Science Foundation rules and the Antarctic Treaty stipulations. There are all kinds of people in the world, and no one can stop them from making jerks of themselves - but we can read this book, be educated, and have a little healthier respect for such places, and in turn educate other people.

This is an interesting travel book, and a good addition to anyone's collection who is interested in travel to far-flung places and especially to anyone who is interested in the south polar regions.

As for Anne Olsen's comments - while I normally do not comment on other people's reviews (and I've done so twice! Yikes!) , I have to say, she is the one completely, totally, absolutely and embarrassingly in the wrong. Mattthiessen describes the first sentence that he "fetched up in Punta Arenas, Chile...." and she claims he made a gross error and states Punta Arenas is in Argentina. I'm sure he's made some mistakes in his book - I have over 1,000 books in my library and it's safe to say every one of them probably has a mistake or two. We are not perfect, we human beings. HOWEVER......... Peter Matthiessen didn't say anything wrong. Punta Arenas is, in fact, in Chile - not Argentina. There are actually a few Punta Arenas (Guatemala, Venezuela, Peru), but it is NOT in Argentina. Can't argue with the map!

After reading Shackleton's "South" I thought I knew a lot about Antarctica, but this book revealed how much I didn't know - the forces at work behind the obstacles Shackleton and other adventurers faced in the quest for the pole, and a greater understanding of the wildlife they encountered. I learned that we cannot understand how the Earth works without understanding how the Antarctic region works - and Matthiessen explains its global reach. The touring format is a wonderful way to learn about the history and science of this region and Matthiessen is a wonderful guide (his poetic prose is Melville-esque). This is my first book by Matthiessen, and I will be sure to read many more.

After reading End of the Earth, by Peter Matthiessen I felt a lot more informed about the continent that you exist, but never really is talked about. Other then that it's a continent made up of water that's been frozen for thousands of years, you really don't know much about. He took a place on earth where most wouldn't dare to venture to once, let alone twice and wrote about it. He gave light to a place where it might have seemed dismal and dreary and gave it life. He makes the reader want to keep learning more about this mysterious place even after the book is all finished and done with. He is very detail in his description and makes sure you understand what's going on, and the feeling he felt while there. From beginning to end, you keep asking yourself why would Matthiessen choose to go on not one, but two different and separate voyages to Antarctica, one of the coldest and dismal places in the world. I would have never thought a book about Antarctica could be so detailed and so interesting. If you like learning about new things, and love nature, this is a good book for you!

Peter Matthiessen is most honestly characterized as a "writer's writer" in that his works most favorably impress literary critics more than they garner mass reader appeal. This effort is a mediocre travel memoir of two different voyages to Antarctica and for each trip the author fills the pages with interesting historical, geographical and natural facts. Unfortunatly this book has no "heart and soul". "End of the Earth" merely 'reports' two stories on Antarctica as if Peter Matthiessen could take it or leave it. The usual book jacket accolades recite "...he blends a vision of harsh beauty, a traveler's love of adventure, and a profound appreciation for the splendors and extraordinary wildlife of a forbidding yet fragile world of ice". If only that were true this could have been a great book.

The book is a series of short vignettes focused on distinct incidents or places encountered in his two visits to the Antarctic but they are tied together to create a single understanding of the region: the ten thousand and the one. As always, Matthiessen is a supurb stylist.

A great read if you want to know what it might be like to actually take such a trip.

I am undoubtedly biased, because I was on the Akademik Ioffe trip to South Georgia and Antarctica with Victor Emanuel, Peter Matthiessen, Bob and Birgit Bateman, et al. It was a splendid, truly brilliant trip, and I really like this book because it documents the highlights of the trip and adds some ruminations and connections to other world issues with vital and descriptive language that is evocative to me. Some descriptions are truly effulgent and capture the essence of what we saw, from tiny, coruscating bubbles of air being released by ancient ice making effervescent, crystalline sounds we could listen to in the great Antarctic silence to the smell of krill in whale breath as yet another whale surfaced and exhaled next to our fragile Zodiacs.

Indeed, this is a journal - I commend it to those with an interest in Antarctic travel and global conservation. For you, I would rate it four stars; for me, six if such were possible.

I am a Matthiessen fan, of his fiction and of his reporting about nature. This book is excellent in both categories; some of the prose describing his ship sailing in the lonesome, gray south lattitudes with a solitary bird circling, hundreds of miles from land, relating these and other images to our own uncertain destiny, compels re-reading and reflection. The descriptions of the wildlife he encounters, the penguins especially, are supremely interesting.

I approached this book as a (former) Matthiessen fan and came away disappointed by the mediocre prose. This was basic, boring descriptive travelogue, repetitious at times, with absolutely no noteworthy or novel insights. But the final telling failure of this book was an element of momentous liberal hypocrisy. Matthiessen chastises the Bush administration for its stance on global warming and places the blame for the impending global destruction at the feet of W, but chooses to ignore his own contributions. Pray tell, how does he justify the carbon emmissions he contributed to the atmosphere to drag his sorry carcass from the Northern hemisphere to Antarctica not just once, but twice? What would he think if the first carbon-reduction agreement was to ban all recreational travel to Antarctica as has been proposed by the Obama administration? (And don't tell me he planted a tree somewhere as a carbon-offset balm for the guilty consciences of the jet-setting liberal elite)

Leave it to Peter Matthiessen to take the last great place on earth and write about it with the same degree of enthusiasm he would have if he were reporting on a geriatric field trip to Wal-Mart. From beginning to end, you keep asking yourself what could possibly have compelled Matthiessen to embark on not one but two seperate voyages to Antarctica, because he seems to have absolutely no passion for the journey or the place itself. In tedious, frequently ossified and yet oddly pretentious prose, he drones ad nauseum with details about what he is seeing, but with a removal that sounds as if he is watching television. You sometimes find yourself wondering if he's really even there at all, for when he sees things that should be astonishing to any mortal, he yawns and seems to find it all rather boring.

Strangely, Matthiessen's eye for endless detail doesn't extend to proofreading; there are errors and innacuracies of both fact and syntax everywhere. He thinks Punta Arenas is in Argentina, which will come as something of a surprise to Chile. He isn't too clear on the submerged proportions of an iceberg,either... he gets it almost right once, then completely wrong another time (four-fifth's can be underwater). Playing fast and loose with the facts, such innacuracies don't help his case when he launches into a tirade against government environmental policy. You want to think he knows what he's talking about, but if he can't tell the difference between Argentina and Chile, what else is he getting wrong?

Besides, if he was as truly as rabid an environmentalist as he would like us to think he is, he wouldn't have gone.

Ultimately, Matthiessen has become the thing he seems to have no patience for: a tourist. Antarctica seems to be just another check on his life list, another entry on his C.V., and I had to laugh when I read on the end flap how he has "participated in expeditions to wild parts of every continent." The book reads and feels as if the only reason he went to Antarctica was so that his publicist could say that with a straight face.

Matthiessen should have stayed home. He probably would have had a better time.