The Entire Earth and Sky: Views on Antarctica - Hardcover

Roberts, Leslie Carol

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0803216173 ISBN 13: 9780803216174

Publisher: University of Nebraska Press, 2008

Synopsis

More than a distant continent, Antarctica is a land of the imagination, shaping and shaped for centuries by explorers, adventurers, scientists, and dreamers. The Entire Earth and Sky conjures all these ideas and interweaves them with the experience and history of Antarctica, balancing the reality of the frigid outpost populated by a ragtag alliance of international researchers against the crystalline dreamscape of a continent at the bottom of the world.
 
When Leslie Carol Roberts went to Antarctica for the first time with Greenpeace, she was hoping to save the world. In the twenty years since then she has shifted to the no less difficult task of saving Antarctica itself, compiling memoirs and stories, learning the biology and geography of the icy land, and documenting her own journey. This book pieces together the tragic and heroic tales of nineteenth-century exploration, interviews with scientists, and the author’s personal observations. The result is a remarkable collage that evokes the beauty and the complexity, the perils and the rewards of a lifelong engagement with the earth’s last wilderness. A kaleidoscope of legends, stories, field notes, images, reports, history, letters, and research, the book renders an impression, at once vast and microscopic, of the effect of human beings on the land and ice we call Antarctica, and its effect on us.

About this title

About the Author

Leslie Carol Roberts, a Fulbright Fellow at Gateway Antarctica New Zealand, teaches in the MFA programs in writing and graduate design at the California College of the Arts, San Francisco. She has written hundreds of articles and essays for magazines, newspapers, and literary journals, including the Bellevue Literary Review, the Christian Science Monitor, and the Sydney Morning Herald.

Review

“Leslie Roberts packed her duffel, her down parka, her bunny boots, her quill, her notebook and headed south. But she also packed her heart, her soul, and her gift. The result is pure art: honest, true to place, original, and lovely. “—David G. Campbell, author of The Crystal Desert: Summers in Antarctica (David G. Campbell 2007-12-06)

“‘I am Antarctica and Antarctica is me,’ Leslie Carol Roberts wants to cry out, knowing that the famous and forbidding land of penguins, ferocious leopard seals, explorers lucky and not, scientists who shag their way through the months-long winter night (also cooks and drivers and pilots and Scott Base string bikinis) is in peril. The Entire Earth and Sky introduces us to the place in a new and thorough and wholly original way. Roberts, possessed of a certain sweet curiosity and impressive smarts, is a poet of the ice, and a cataloger, too. In the end she makes one thing clear: we are all Antarctica, and Antarctica is us.”—Bill Roorbach, author of Temple Stream, Big Bend, and Into Woods (Bill Roorbach 2007-12-14)

“Roberts shows a poet’s attention to detail. . . . [She] tells many forgotten stories of Antarctica in an engaging style that will appeal to anyone with an interest in cold places, travel adventures, and overlooked history.”—Booklist (Colleen Mondor Booklist 2008-09-15)

“[Roberts] bring[s] to life and light the historic port of Lyttelton. . . . Roberts introduces readers to the intriguing Norris, a man entirely dedicated to preserving the artifacts and thus shaping the narrative of one specific place on Earth.”—Orion (Gretchen Legler Orion)

“Roberts’ seriousness, respect, and deep reflections about Antarctica run through the narrative as a strong thread, drawing it together into a potent whole.”—Melbourne Historical Journal (Jesse Blackadder Melbourne Historical Journal)

Edition details

• Publisher: University of Nebraska Press
• Publication date: 2008
• ISBN 10: 0803216173
• ISBN 13: 9780803216174
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 322