Customer Reviews

Life on the Ice: No One Goes To Antarctica Alone

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

 

 

Roff Smith writes in this book about more than one trip to Antarctica, and in each trip he moves around from base to base to explore the place. For this reason, the book feels a bit disjointed, but it is a great portrait of the place and the people who live and work there today and the support systems that help them from the outside. Smith is often funny, as well as awestruck. That seems to be the effect the place has on people.

Though I don't usually read non-fiction, I found this book to be really enjoyable. I did not know much about Antartica before reading Life on the Ice but before I knew it, I had learned a lot. I had to smile at his description of the penguins! This book is great for those hot summer days, it transports you to another world. For me, it took a few chapters to get into it but when I finished it, I shared it with my husband. He was able to get into it right away and loved it.

How can you do a National Geographic book that covers multiple trips to Antarctica with no photographs and no maps? I also found Smith's condescending comments about the United States to be annoying. Yes, I can imagine the beaurocracy seemed pointless and tedious, but still. Not to acknowledge in the list of acknowledgments anything of value provided to him by the U.S. Antarticic Program seems petty. To read between the lines, I felt that Smith was saying that an Antarctica with no U.S. presence would be superior to any value that the U.S. has provided there.

I've been looking for a book on Antarctica as I will soon be going there in a research support capacity. I was anxious to get an account of "what it is really like" being down there. Smith's accounts of dealing with the US program were especially interesting to me. His writing is humerous, insightful and thoroughly enjoyable to read. After reading this book, I think I have a decent sense of what to expect (his description of the pre-trip paperwork has already proven to be dead-on).

For my purposes, this is by far the best book I've read on this subject.

I've been fascinated with Antarctica since hearing Vaughan Williams' Sympony No. 7 "Antarctica." This is the first book about the area that I've read. I found it fascinating right from page one. The author wastes no time getting to the ship and the voyage, and does a tremendous job describing the landscape.

However, for a book about a personal journey to a place 99.9% of the readers will never visit, I found it downright stupid (sorry) that there are NO photographs of this foreign landscape! One of the very first scenes described by the author is how a group of penguins poked around his camera bag, so we know the author took many, many pictures...how about sharing a few of them?

That's my only complaint, and the reason for 4 instead of 5 stars.

I really enjoyed this book! What makes a book good for me is when I want to run out and read more about that particular subject. The author made it interesting for the lay person since he is not a scientist himself. I have to agree about the pictures though. I was so fascinated by what the author was describing but couldnt really visualize such a landscape. I found myself googling Antarctica pictures to get more of an idea.