Antarctic Odyssey: In the Footsteps of the South Polar Explorers - Softcover
A full-color, beautifully illustrated journey across the icy last continent, the homes of its endangered animals, and the history of its exploration.
It is the most remote and inhospitable, the coldest and driest of the earth's continents. Its bleakly stunning landscapes have attracted the boldest of the heroic age of exploration. Graham Collier tells its story in gorgeous photographs and vivid prose - and how, like Scott, Amundsen, Shackleton, and others before him, he fell under the spell of Antarctica.
Very few people, scientists or explorers, have seen Antarctica as has Graham Collier. He has visited the camps of Scott and Shackleton, reached the slopes of the 13,000-foot volcanic Mount Erebus, and traveled to the unimaginably remote Peter I Island and Elephant Island, where the crew of the Endurance was marooned for four months. He has walked among basking seals, called on penguin rookeries, been dive-bombed by skua-gulls, and admired albatrosses like those in "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner." Following in the footsteps of the great explorers from Captain Cook and James Clark Ross to Shackleton and Douglas Mawson, he re-creates the experience of encountering the "last continent" in all its icy splendor.
In this exquisite book, Collier attempts to answer polar explorer Jean-Baptiste Charcot's question, "Where does the strange attraction of the polar regions lie, so powerful, so gripping that on one's return from them one forgets all weariness of body and soul and dreams only of going back?
"synopsis" may belong to another edition of this title.
From Publishers Weekly:
Collier's crystalline account of his several recent trips to the bottom of the world aboard scientific research shipsAand once on a converted Russian icebreakerAis a wondrous, serendipitous adventure. A regular contributor to National Geographic, Collier set out to retrace portions of the historic journeys of pioneering polar explorers such as Roald Amundsen, Sir Ernest Shackleton, Robert Falcon Scott and James Ross. He visited remote, gale-racked Elephant Island, where Shackleton, after abandoning his ice-jammed ship Endurance, spent 105 days marooned with his men in 1915. The story of Shackleton's amazing escape in an Antarctic winter, and his return to rescue his crew, as re-created by Collier, is a remarkable odyssey of stamina, courage and faith in the face of hopeless odds. He also follows the tragic journey of Scott, who perished with his men in 1912 on his return from the South Pole after discovering that Amundsen had beaten them there. Collier's wife, Patricia, who accompanied him on his Antarctic treks, took the stunning color photographs, complementing his eloquent narrative with images of the continent's eerie beauty, incandescent blue icebergs and platoons of indomitable penguins. Drawing freely from the polar explorers' diaries to gauge his own adventures against theirs, Collier sees Antarctica as a metaphor for the brevity and frailty of human life on the planet. While David Campbell's The Crystal Desert (1992) offers a more thorough tour of Antarctica's biology and ecosystems, the Colliers' effort provides an eloquently expressed romantic view of the continent and of the human encounter with it. 50,000 first printing. (Nov.)
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Library Journal:
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Collier, a regular contributor to National Geographic, has visited Antarctica seven times on various scientific research vessels. This book is a composite of these trips, beautifully illustrated with color photographs by his wife, Patricia. Even with modern-day equipment, it is extremely difficult to navigate the more remote islands of the Antarctic and even more dangerous to go ashore owing to terrible weather conditions. Collier does a wonderful job of describing the raw beauty of the continent, with its huge glaciers and vast bird populations. Penguins and penguin behavior are explained, as are the mating habits of other wildlife, especially albatrosses, leopard seals, and skua gulls. The author relates his voyage to those made by past polar explorers such as Shackleton, Ross, Scott, Campbell, and Mawson. A beautiful book for public libraries.
-John Kenny, San Francisco P.L.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.
-John Kenny, San Francisco P.L.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.
"About this title" may belong to another edition of this title.
- PublisherBook Sales
- Publication date2001
- ISBN 10 0762843616
- ISBN 13 9780762843619
- BindingPaperback
- Number of pages192
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