Terra Incognita: Travels in Antarctica - Hardcover

Wheeler, Sara

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 067944078X ISBN 13: 9780679440789

Publisher: Random House, 1998

Synopsis

It is the coldest, windiest, driest place on earth, an icy desert of unearthly beauty and stubborn impenetrability. For centuries, Antarctica has captured the imagination of our greatest scientists and explorers, lingering in the spirit long after their return. Shackleton called it "the last great journey"; for Apsley Cherry-Garrard it was the worst journey in the world.

This is a book about the call of the wild and the response of the spirit to a country that exists perhaps most vividly in the mind. Sara Wheeler spent seven months in Antarctica, living with its scientists and dreamers. No book is more true to the spirit of that continent--beguiling, enchanted and vast beyond the furthest reaches of our imagination. Chosen by Beryl Bainbridge and John Major as one of the best books of the year, recommended by the editors of Entertainment Weekly and the Chicago Tribune, one of the Seattle Times's top ten travel books of the year, Terra Incognita is a classic of polar literature.
From the Trade Paperback edition.

About this title

Review:

When explorers such as Ernest Shackleton, Roald Amundsen, and Robert Falcon Scott all set off to Antarctica in the early years of the 20th century, the polar regions were among the last truly unexplored areas of the world--and arguably the least hospitable. Scott lost his life, pinned down in a howling blizzard only 11 miles from his supply depot; Shackleton lost his ship, crushed in the ice. Even those who survived the icy wastes did so only with enormous effort. And yet, there is something about Antarctica that beckons people; eighty years after Shackleton's voyage, Sara Wheeler answered the call, leaving her comfortable home for "the Great White." Terra Incognita is the result of her sojourn in that legendary land.

In addition to chronicling her own encounters with the people and the place, Wheeler brings the past alive as well, through vivid stories about the heroes of polar exploration: Shackleton, Scott, Amundsen, and others who practically become secondary characters in Wheeler's account. But it is her interactions with the living people who make up the community--scientists, drifters, and dreamers who have settled this forbidding landscape--that make Terra Incognita a rare and worthy book.

From the Back Cover:

"A triumph . . . I cannot believe that anything better will ever be written about Antarctica." --Daily Telegraph

"Compelling . . . leaves the reader with a visceral understanding of the mysterious, even sublime power the poles have exerted
on the human imagination, and the desolate beauty that resides there amid the glaciers and icebergs and penguins."
--Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times

"I have read many accounts of polar exploration, but never one which so touchingly describes its emotional topography. . . . What she has done could not be done better." --Richard Eyre, The Independent

"The first funny book about Antarctica." --Los Angeles Times

About this edition

• Publisher: Random House
• Publication date: 1998
• ISBN 10: 067944078X
• ISBN 13: 9780679440789
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 350