Terra Antarctica: Looking into the Emptiest Continent - Softcover

Fox, William L.

3.81

37 ratings by Goodreads

9781593761486: Terra Antarctica: Looking into the Emptiest Continent

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1593761481 ISBN 13: 9781593761486

Publisher: Counterpoint, 2007

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How does the human mind transform space into place, or land into landscape? For more than three decades, William L. Fox has looked at empty landscapes and the role of the arts to investigate the way humans make sense of space. In Terra Antarctica, Fox continues this line of inquiry as he travels to the Antarctic, the largest and most extreme desert on earth.” This contemporary travel narrative interweaves artistic, cartographic, and scientific images with anecdotes from the author's three-month journey in the Antarctic to create an absorbing and readable narrative of the remote continent. Through its images, history... and firsthand experiences snowmobile trips through whiteouts and his icy solo hikes past the edge of the mapped world Fox brings to life a place that few have seen and offers us a look into both the nature of landscape and ourselves.

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About the Author:

William L. Fox has been a visiting scholar at the Getty Research Institute, as well as a Lannan Foundation Writer in Residence.

From Booklist:

*Starred Review* So pristine is Antarctica, and so spare is its ecosystem, it has become a living laboratory for scientists studying everything from the icy continent's microbial life to cosmic radiation. Thanks to the National Science Foundation program, in which author Fox participated, it is also a sublime studio for artists and writers. Fox became fascinated with how visitors to Antarctica, a land wholly unlike the realm in which humans evolved, are baffled by mirages and "cognitive dissonance." The continent's "monolithic expanses of flat white ice" confound our perceptual mechanism. Fox vividly describes his own disorienting sensory experiences while trekking across the world's largest desert and offers a fresh and enlightening history of the two disciplines have that enabled us to "see" otherwise incomprehensible places: cartography and landscape art. This leads to intriguing portraits of Antarctica's first explorers and the gifted men who mapped, drew, painted, and photographed its spectacular and daunting vistas, staggering accomplishments Fox compares to today's intrepid Antarctic science and art in a lively report on life at McMurdo Station and the South Pole. Thoughtful and enjoyable on many fronts, Fox's uniquely fashioned chronicle of Antarctica brings into sharper focus the crucial symbiosis between art and science. Donna Seaman
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