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.

Reviews

A vast subgenre of travel books exists about the polar regions, but Roberts carves out a comfortable niche of her own with this elegantly crafted combination of historiography, natural science, and memoir. Having visited Antarctica herself, she blends personal experiences with those of others who explored the continent in the past. Special attention is given to Frank Worsley, the navigator who saved Shackleton and his crew, as Roberts runs down old legends and new and takes readers on a modern tour of Lyttelton, New Zealand, the jumping-off point for many South Pole explorers and a town that celebrates its past and present association with the ice. Describing herself as an “Antarctican who made sense of place with words,” Roberts shows a poet’s attention to detail in her descriptions of the men who worked the southern seas but have been eclipsed by their famous leaders. Roberts tells many forgotten stories of Antarctica in an engaging title that will appeal to anyone with an interest in cold places, travel adventures, and overlooked history. --Colleen Mondor

Edition details

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