WILD ICE

Customer Reviews:

Almost the definitive work on Antarctica........2004-12-25

If ever you have considered visiting Antarctica - for whatever reasons, this is the one book which will answer those questions which we, until now, unanswered.

It says much for this work - which is described as a voyage of images and reflections by four explorers and photographers, that the final copyright of the book itself is shown as belonging to the Smithsonian Institute. A sign of quality in itself. It would be easy to describe those images as "Outstanding" or "Stunning" - and so they are, but those words are too frequently used for lesser photographs.

This is a book which explains the Antarctic in a way in which it has not been explained before. It does so with an excellent mix of text and photography which, as I have said, answers those questions that until now remained unanswered.

If all you want is to know something about Antarctica - then stop and pick up this book. You will not be disappointed.

NM

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Incredible Study of Polar Hardships
Ice Story Reveiw
Ice Story: Shakleton's Lost Expedition

Ice Story: Shackleton's Lost Expedition
Elizabeth Cody Kimmel
Manufacturer: Clarion Books
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

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Trapped by the Ice!: Shackleton's Amazing Antarctic Adventure
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The Endurance - Shackleton's Legendary Antarctic Expedition
Shackleton's Stowaway

ASIN: 0395915244

Book Description

This dramatic, suspenseful narrative reads like an adventure story-but it is true. In 1914, Sir Ernest Shackleton and a twenty-seven-man crew set off on an expedition to reach and cross Antarctica. Just a month and a half into the voyage, their ship, the Endurance, was caught fast in heavy pack ice. The men had no radio contact, and no one knew where they were or even that they were in trouble. None of them should have survived the ordeal that followed-unstable ice floes, treacherous waters, freezing temperatures, and starvation. Only the extraordinary leadership, courage, and strength of Shackleton brought the whole team safely through. Elizabeth Cody Kimmel's clear, compelling text is illustrated with photographs, taken and carefully preserved by the ship's photographer, that record the stark condition and the day-to-day activities of the men. Hand-drawn maps that show the extraordinary route of the Endurance and her crew. Bibliography, index.

Customer Reviews:

Incredible Study of Polar Hardships.......2007-09-01

My homeschooled kids LOVED this book. It doesn't have the bright pictures or tongue-in-check narration sported by other juvenile books but the story captured the attention of my 9-, 7-, and 5- year olds. We used this as a springboard into our study of Arctic habitats and polar explorers. I read it aloud over the course of two weeks, chapter by chapter to my younger ones. My oldest couldn't wait and snuck off to devour it during quiet time. He was so inspired by the details of their adventure and the amazing black and white photographs, he decided to go on his own "virtual" expedition which has spun off into a huge research project. It starts a tad dry but it doesn't take long before the intrigue of a real life stowaway, midnight dog races, and an incredible story of survival captures everyone's interest. A great tool to emphasize power of leadership, ingenuity, perseverance, and hope. I would HIGHLY recommend this as the main stay of a polar unit, which can then be supplemented with the more accessible juvenile books.

Ice Story Reveiw.......2002-06-10

This was a very interesting book and i would recamend it to anyone who like adventure.

Ice Story: Shakleton's Lost Expedition.......1999-12-15

The true story with lots of original photographs of Sir Ernest Shakleton's unsuccessful Antarctic Expedition. The hardships they faced were incredible, yet Shackleton was a true commander. He kept his men together in mind and body. Excellent adventure book and recommend it for grades 3 through 11th. Also recommended reading for teachers and parents.

On the Ice: An Intimate Portrait of Life at McMurdo Station, Antarctica (World As Home, The)

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At Home at the Bottom of the World
Simply Horrid
Her visit was intended to research the landscape; her book is about the crazy people she found there
Horrible...Sorry, Really Horrible
Should be titled "How I became infatuated with Ruth (in Antarctica)"

On the Ice: An Intimate Portrait of Life at McMurdo Station, Antarctica (World As Home, The)
Gretchen Legler
Manufacturer: Milkweed Editions
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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ASIN: 157131282X

Book Description

Travelogue, cultural meditation, and love story, On the Ice casts a panoramic view on one of the oddest communities in one of the most extreme places on earth. Sent to Antarctica as an observer by the National Science Foundation, Gretchen Legler arrives at McMurdo Station in midwinter, a time of -70 degree temperatures and months of near-total darkness. A lesbian struggling with a tumultuous past, she hopes to escape her own demons and present an intimate view of a place few will ever visit. What she discovers is a community of people stripped of any excess by the necessities of existence in a harsh land, where revered scientists are referred to as “beakers”; where cherished belongings are left without regret in a communal lost-and-found; and where women are rare but lesbians in high proportion. Forced to confront her own fears, Legler experiences firsthand how landscape and community allow a life to reset.

Customer Reviews:

At Home at the Bottom of the World.......2007-07-19

Nature writing is changing. The surest mark of that change is the fact that Gretchen Legler's book, On the Ice: An Intimate Portrait of Life at McMurdo Station, Antarctica, was chosen as the best book of environmental creative writing published in 2005-2006 by the Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment.

On the Ice is the story of what it means to find home, and heart, in the frozen place at the bottom of the world. With other artists, Gretchen Legler was offered the opportunity to spend a season in Antarctica under the auspices of the National Science Foundation Artists and Writers Program, to tell the story of the land, to try her hand "at making some human sense of its vastness and its terrible beauty." It was a quest, she says, not only to explore and discover new lands, but also inner worlds, "places that I hoped being so far from my ordinary self would help me find."

Antarctica as a place is extraordinarily far from the places our ordinary selves inhabit, and Legler wants us not just to know but to feel the distance, and to feel it as the explorers of a century ago must have felt it. She sleeps in a room that is only a stone's throw from the hut where Robert Scott set off in 1911 for his tragic bid to reach the Pole: "Good God, this is an awful place," he wrote. She spends time with other explorers who are looking even farther back, into the unthinkably remote geologic past of the Polar region, into samples of sea floor at Cape Roberts, goes naked into the coldest water on the globe, and ventures into ice caves in the Erebus glacier, blue caves, blue, blue "like an endlessly deep hole in your heart . . . a color that is like some kind of yearning, some unfulfilled desire, or some constant, extreme joy." And then there is the sea ice, glowing "peach and pink, nearly neon, buttery yellow, lavender, jade, and indigo," colors painted by Edmund Wilson, Scott's chief scientist, whose watercolors, she says are filled with, focused on light and color, color and light. And finally, there is the Pole, a "sacred destination," she says, not only for explorers but scientists and, yes, artists and writers, who find it the perfect place to look down into the mysteries at the earth's heart and up, into the mysteries of the universe, "the very farthest edge of darkness."

On the Ice is a luminous study of a remarkable place, a place that is so sublime as to almost defy human description. But as humans, we must place ourselves: we long to live in place and to make even the remotest place a home. And so the book is also about the men and women who live there, about the scientists, support staff, builders, workers, engineers, electricians, cooks, communications technicians--all the people it takes to make a home in an inhospitable place. These are people, by and large, who are willing, perhaps even anxious, to shed their ordinary selves and live in an extraordinary way, coping with the isolation and the cold and the loneliness, building a community of fellow-travelers, each with his or her own sometimes desperate reasons for coming to a place so unimaginably distant and different from the places where the rest of us live. These are funny people, weird people, misfits, heroes, people who live on hope and thrive on hard truths, people who have come away from the "real" world to invent themselves in a different reality.

But On the Ice isn't just about the place or the people. It's about Legler's own journey to the frozen wastes within herself, into her own frozen heart, which is thawed, incredibly, by the power of love. "How do you come to know place?" she asks. "How do you come to know self? . . . How do you let go of wounds and resentments and fierce anger, not begrudgingly, but as an act of grace?" She finds the answer to this age-old question in her relationship with Ruth, an electrician who helps her to shed "all that junk . . .all those layers of old self" and discover a new and loving self, a warm and passionate heart, in this frozen world. Some readers, particularly those who believe that books of natural history ought to exclude the historian's experience, may think that this part of the journey should have been omitted, as not quite worthy of the heroic spectacle that is the Antarctic. But that's the way it's always been, Legler reminds us: the personal has always been defined, she says, as "somehow gossipy or small, beyond or below the reach of proper recording." But why? Why do we deny the human perspective of place, since this is the only perspective we have? And why exclude the innermost experience, merely to focus on the outer? "Why obscure the intimate?" Legler asks. "Why shorten the story of the glorious complexity and depth of the human in order to make a neater, grander tale?"

Legler's journey--and her record of it--is all the more remarkable because it is an intimate journey, not only to the farthest place on earth but into the deepest desires and dreams of the human spirit. It's a singularly brave journey, as heroic in its way as the journeys of Scott and Shackleton and Amundsen, one more exploration of the truest human question: what it means to be at home on this earth. There are a great many books that will give you the cold, hard facts about the Antarctic. But as a book about place, a chronicle of life at the bottom of the world, and an intensely honest record of a spiritual journey, On the Ice is the most richly illuminating of all.

Susan Wittig Albert, co-editor of What Wildness is This: Women Write About the Southwest, University of Texas Press, 2007

Simply Horrid.......2006-12-27

I read this book while in Antarctica last year and had to force myself to finish it. It became a contest of wills to see if I could red the entire book. McMurdo is a weird place, no doubt about it. But somehow, while the author perhaps had the best intentions, it veered off into something that becomes rather incomprehensible. I spent over seven seasons on the ice and there are so many other stories to tell; the people, scientists, raytheon, projects, science, bureaucracy, idiocy, etc., that would make a great story. This book is unfortunately not a great story. Buy another book, any other book...

Her visit was intended to research the landscape; her book is about the crazy people she found there.......2006-05-20

McMurdo Station, Antarctica is home to freezing temperatures, months of nearly total darkness and regular near-hurricane force winds. It's also home to a permanent station, McMurdo, and for a season was home to author Gretchen Legler, who tells of this season and those who have journeyed to Antarctica to escape life. Her visit was intended to research the landscape; her book is about the crazy people she found there. ON THE ICE is thus about an exploration few others will make: you'll have to read the book to live her discoveries vicariously.

Diane C. Donovan, Editor
California Bookwatch

Horrible...Sorry, Really Horrible.......2006-05-15

I'm sorry to say this, but this is simply a horrible book. Gretchen Legler is too self-absorbed, too self-pitying, simply too selfish. Her grant from the NSF Artist and Writers Program surely wasn't intended to fund this whining drivel about how much her parents don't love her, about how she found lesbian love in Antarctica, about tangental ramblings that meander into nothingness.

Surely, it can't be about the prose, either. This writer, simply, uses, too, many, run-on, sentences...the overuse, of, the, comma, is, almost Shatner-esque, in, a, way. Here is a quote...one sentence, mind you, wherein even she has to remind herself TWICE what she's writing about midway through:

"When the first bit of core, real core, not just mud from the surface, came out of the drill, says Brian Reid, one of the bearded, bright-eyed New Zealanders at Cape Roberts, telling a story over tea in the camp's galley - when the first bit of real core came out of that noise, yellow-engine-pounding room full of small, tight men with hard hats, gloves, and mud-splattered faces, when that first long roll of dark clayey material came up, and when driller Pat "The Rat" Cooper, who's drilled all over the world, when Pat himself brought the core into the drill site lab, people started yelling all around, "He hit the hard stuff, He hit the hard stuff," well, you should have just seen it - "Pat and Peter holding it and jumping up and down just like kids, just like kids, just like kids."

Good Lord. That is ONE SENTENCE! Pages and pages and pages of this. It's maddening.

If you really want to read about life on "the ice," I strongly suggest Rolf Smith's excellent "Life on the Ice: No One Goes to Antarctica Alone," or Nicholas Johnson's "Big Dead Place: Inside the Strange and Menacing World of Antarctica." Both are wonderful accounts of the mysterious land down south. Neither will frustrate you, nor do they care one damn bit about why some self-absorbed writer's daddy won't call her. Boo-hoo.

Should be titled "How I became infatuated with Ruth (in Antarctica)".......2006-01-07

I completely agree with the comments made by the reader from Cleveland. This book is horrible! Roff Smith's book "Life on the ice" is infinitely better. NSF got ripped off funding this author.

Antarctica: Or, Two years amongst the ice of the South Pole

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Antarctica: Or, Two years amongst the ice of the South Pole
Otto Nordenskjold
Manufacturer: Archon Books
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Unknown Binding

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ASIN: 0208016422

Time on Ice: A Winter Voyage to Antarctica

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Sail to Antarctica
Nice to read
A little slow, but overall a good book.
Experiencing Life
I read it "in the raw..."

Time on Ice: A Winter Voyage to Antarctica
Deborah Shapiro , and Rolf Bjelke
Manufacturer: International Marine Publishing
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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ASIN: 0071353224

Amazon.com

In 1989, Deborah Shapiro and Rolf Bjelke willingly set sail for a land of ice and snow. Their goal (reminiscent of the Age of Exploration): to captain a 40-foot sailboat, the Northern Light, from Sweden to the Antarctic Peninsula and back, and overwinter in one of the earth's most beautiful yet inhospitable places. During the 28,000-nautical-mile trip, they endured battering seas, treacherous ice flows, and complete isolation while frozen at the bottom of the world. Time on Ice is the result of their struggles and ultimate achievement. In alternating chapters, the married coauthors recount a remarkable three-year odyssey that peaks with their interment in an Antarctic winter. But the awe-inspiring vistas, seldom-seen wildlife, and personal discoveries far outweigh the dangers. This is a fascinating journey to one of the world's wildest and loneliest places.

Book Description

When they sailed their modest metal-hulled sailboat NORTHERN LIGHT safely free of Antarctica the first time, adventurers Deborah Shapiro and Rolf Bjelke vowed never to go back. But they neglected the power of the human mind to forget pain. Drawn by a compulsion to trace the route of Shackleton ... memories of awe-striking beauty ... a need to test themselves and their game craft ... and a wish to be more alone and unfettered than any other humans on Earth, they made plans to sail once again for Antarctica and to overwinter there, locked in the ice. LIBRARY JOURNAL called their story "compelling reading."

Customer Reviews:

Sail to Antarctica.......2002-01-05

An incredble journey.

Well written, alternating chapters between Deborah and Rolf. This is a wild ride. Most of us sailors/adventurers will never make this journey. Deborah and Rolf are the most likeable and articulate sailor-environmentalists that show us life from Pole to Pole. If you have any interest in Antarctica or blue water sailing, you willl find this book to be very compelling.

Nice to read.......2001-12-14

This is a very interesting book. I was amazed with their strength to accomplish their dream. The only negative aspect is that the book sometimes has a lot of details and it lacks more details about their day to day activities.

A little slow, but overall a good book........2001-09-02

While I can't quite share the enthusiasm of several of the other reviewers (Viking spirit and all that), I thought this was a solid book and enjoyable to read. It generally moves along at a slow pace, but this is to be expected given the nature of the trip. Accounts alternate from Deborah's view to Rolf's. Of the two, Deborah is the slightly better writer and she sometimes hits on long bouts of excellent descriptions of everything from the weather to their mood. Rolf's writing is more technical but provides a decent balance to Deborah's. This may not be hardcore, edge-of-your-seat adventure (though there are tense moments), but it's a good bet for anyone interested in long distance sailing, Antartica, polar environmentalism, or any combination of these.

Experiencing Life.......2000-09-21

This book is one of the few books that portrays not only the classic aspects of human adventure but the more philosiphical underpinnings of our own life experiences in the clutter of modern civilization. Time on Ice will not only take you to antarctica, but to the desolation and isolation experienced therin. The moments of beauty, excitement, distress and love all connect at a very human level. I would recomend this book to anyone, something i have never done before.

I read it "in the raw...".......1999-02-11

I have been fortunate to share Deb and Rolf's adventures; I stayed in radio communications with them throughout both their arctic-antarctic adventures, and helped edit both their books. Even in draft form, even though I knew the story in detail, its first reading was exciting. It is truly unfortunate that a lot of the material was cut during the final edit by the publisher.

I've also seen the video that was made during their stay...it punctuates their story with unforgetable images.

Customer Reviews:

As dense as the ice shield..........2003-08-25

Like the previous reviewer, I too quailed at the start of this book. Immediately I was plunged to half page paragraphs and dense terms, swimming between excessive description and dense science. But, I'm a geologist. I've been to Antarctica. I knew I could do it...

I suspect that this book will remain unsurpassed for being an all encompassing tome on Antarctica for decades, possibly even centuries ... maybe even until we emerege from this interglacial period and the Western Ice sheet melts, thus giving up the secrets to climate control and Antarctica. I can't imagine much has been left out at all - Pyne is unbelievably, incredibly thorough. Every facet of the ice, and every facet he could think to associate with ice has been methodically slotted into this book. And if he ran out of talking about anything to do with the ice, he'd talk about Antarctica.

But this book is very, very, very, VERY heavy going. I set myself a goal of 25 pages/night - but it still took 2 months to read... Sometimes, I just had to take a break. And as I ploughed ever onwards, I constantly wondered, 'how would someone be able to read this if they hadn't actually been to Antactica???' And other times, I even qualified that with a "would anyone really understand this if they weren't a geologist or in a similar field?' I mean, Pyne can be descriptive, but at other times, adjectives seem to be insufficient, so he swoops into heavy scientific jargon.

I also missed having some diagrams. A few 'colour' photos even... (Ok, colour is a bit misleading - its all white, blue and grey down there...). Antarctica is so stark and sparse, that sometimes, it is just better to look at a photograph of the deep glacier blue of ice (well, actually, WHY ice is blue was something Pyne overlooked in this book, now I think of it! Rainbows and bubbles people...), or a vast plain of continental ice, or the weird solar and weather patterns that can pervade above the ice...

If you can't make it down to Antarctica, but want to become an authority on it, then you can go no further than this book. If wading through the heaviest and densest book written in a long time is something you will need to build up to, the maybe start with something like, Antarctica: The Blue Continent, and see if you want to progress from there - at least then you will have some pictures in mind of what to expect when Pyne melts into deep prose...

Heorism - required.......2003-07-04

The planning to buy this book was detailed and meticulous. Consultations had to be held with interested parties (my sons) and the wait for it to arrive was lengthy - at least ten days.
It was with a sense of mounting excitement that we eagerly surveyed the flat white cover of the package, I could sense our goal. I knew it wasn't going to be easy traversing 428 pages of a book titled "The Ice" but I had completed intensive practical training for this expedition. I was a veteran of Huntsford's "Schackleton", Huxley's "Scott of the Antarctic", Fuchs & Hillary's "The Crossing of Antarctica", the list was long but rewarding. Here was my biggest challenge to date.
The warnings were stark right from the start, the prologue uses half a page to list 72 ways to name ice. I stumbled and nearly gave up. Willpower, only willpower kept me going. I was becoming word blind. Reaching my first goal, the middle, I could only contemplate with horror the trials still awaiting me. "Great God, this is an awful book", I thought as I turned the next page. I wondered if I had the stamina to make it, others before me must have faltered. My son looked at me, "I'm just going out, I may be some time". I could only admire his courage, at having come so far. I ploughed on, yet another reference to Admiral Byrd appeared on the horizon. Until now I had been unaware of his supreme importance as an American and Antarctic explorer. Similarly I had been foolishly unaware of the fact that "...there is nothing in the Heroic age to compare with Ellsworth's all-or-nothing transcontinental flight, even Schackleton turned back..." The fact that Ellsworth achieved precisely nothing is of no importance, he was an American.
Things were looking bleak, stamina was draining fast. A crevasse nearly finished me as I learned that TMW Turner (English) had painted sunsets. I began to lose hope, I was hallucinating, could he really mean JMW Turner who painted ships too, and trains ? It was my darkest hour, all hope was gone. I closed the book.
This is a book for the fanatical written by someone who equates flowery, overblown prose with literature, it is so bad it is almost a parody. If you want to read about the modern Antarctic, read Sara Wheeler's polar classic "Terra Incognita". The best place for Pyne's tome is on an iceberg, drifting slowly out of sight towards the equator.

Hard to read but you still can't seem to get enough........1998-08-31

Stephen Pyne is a difficult writer, but the depth and meticulous nature of his intelligence pulls you back to him even though you tell yourself to lighten up and read a good mystery. Three cheers to university presses (U of Iowa and U of Washington) for putting and keeping this book in print. The Ice touches on everything about Antarctica: the history, the landscape, the literature, the geology, the biology. The book is all-encompassing--as is The Ice that is its focus and deep passion. It's worth the effort, and your vocabulary will never be the same afterwards. You can read a mystery later.

Trial by ice: A photobiography of Sir Ernest Shackleton

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Trial by ice: A photobiography of Sir Ernest Shackleton
K. M Kostyal
Manufacturer: Scholastic
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

Shipwreck at the Bottom of the World: The Extraordinary True Story of Shackleton and the Endurance

ASIN: 0439184495

Antarctica: An Encyclopedia from Abbott Ice Shelf to Zooplankton

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Antarctica: An Encyclopedia from Abbott Ice Shelf to Zooplankton

Manufacturer: Firefly Books
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

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Antarctica: The Blue Continent
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ASIN: 1552975908

Book Description

Arranged alphabetically and extensively cross-referenced, this fact-packed, definitive guide to Antarctica includes over 1,000 entries and 250 photographs covering climate, geology, natural history, exploration, science, tourism and conservation.

An indispensable reference for the curious, the armchair traveler, the budding scientist and the environmentalist, Antarctica will fascinate and inform about the world's last true wilderness with answers to questions such as:

How was Antarctica formed?
The effects of Antarctica's weather on the world's climate
The life of an iceberg
Life on land beneath the ice
The importance of the scientific work in Antarctica.

To some people, Antarctica is an uninhabited and uninhabitable vastness of ice and snow. Cold though it may be, the continent is a hotbed of scientific research and a growing tourist destination. For all its remoteness, Antarctica is more accessible than ever before. More than 250 flights land at the South Pole each summer and cruise ships bring 12,000 tourists.

Designated since 1959 as a natural reserve devoted to peace and research, Antarctica is host to scientists working on everything from the origin of black holes to climate change to understanding the movements of icebergs the size of Delaware.

Antarctica: An Encyclopedia from Abbot Ice Shelf to Zooplankton covers the natural wonders, wildlife, explorers, adventurers and discoveries that have been made at the bottom of the world.

Life on the Ice: No One Goes to Antarctica Alone

Average customer rating:

good writing, interesting stories, but...
Several trips in one book
Great book
Needs Pictures!
Really enjoyable

Life on the Ice: No One Goes to Antarctica Alone
Roff Smith
Manufacturer: National Geographic
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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

ASIN: 0792293452
Release Date: 2005-02-01

Customer Reviews:

good writing, interesting stories, but..........2007-05-21

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.

Several trips in one book.......2006-08-04

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.

Great book.......2006-06-24

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.

Needs Pictures!.......2005-10-04

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.

Really enjoyable.......2005-09-30

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.

What the Ice Gets : Shackleton's Antarctic Expedition 1914-1916

Average customer rating:

Overwhelming story, finely crafted
A stanza may be worth ten thousand words of prose.
Shackleton Brought to Life

What the Ice Gets : Shackleton's Antarctic Expedition 1914-1916
Melinda Mueller
Manufacturer: Van West & Company, Publishers
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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ASIN: 0967702119

Book Description

Blending historical, scientific, and literary scholarship with an impressive range of poetic forms, Melinda Mueller masterfully brings us the legendary tale of Sir Ernest Shackleton's Trans-Antarctic Expedition. What the Ice Gets is an adventure story, a requiem, and a love poem written to 28 heroes and the mythic landscape they set out to explore but that instead explored them.

Customer Reviews:

Overwhelming story, finely crafted.......2002-11-08

The Shackleton story is amazing, but this accounting of it is stunningly thought through and executed. Read it over and over.

A stanza may be worth ten thousand words of prose........2001-07-28

This is a case where the economy of a well-crafted poetic line accomplishes what might take a page of prose. The imagery and emotion evoked by this slim volume more than capture the beauty and desperation experienced by Shackleton and his company. No space is wasted on mundane logistical cataloging and diary-keeping. Instead the reader is in the grip of perilous nature from beginning to end. The final section sketching the fate of the men after their great adventure on the ice shows that miraculously overcoming one peril does not innoculate you against life's other afflictions.

Shackleton Brought to Life.......2000-12-01

This epic poem brings Shackleton's attempt to reach the South Pole to life! Some of the chapters tell the story from the point of view of individual members of the expedition; some describe particular events. Each fact is documented. Its one thing to know that Shackleton and a part of the crew left the rest of the crew behind, and travelled 800 miles in a dory on a rescue mission. Mueller brings the situation to life, describing the plight of both the rescuers and the rescuees. And then, in a moving and haunting conclusion, she tells of some of the individual's lives after the voyage. In sum, its an adventurist's story, a naturalist's story, a poet's story. A book you will want to reread, read out loud, and give to your friends.

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