Juhana Pettersson

Antarctic Research Blog #126: The Ice Cave

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Non-fiction: Lucy Jane Bledsoe: The Ice Cave (University of Wisconsin Press, 2006)

The Ice Cave is a travel book, but more to the point, it’s a book about experiencing nature. The title refers to an ice cave the writer Lucy Jane Bledsoe visited as a child, and which she describes as her first profound experience of a natural environment.

She also participated in the U.S. Antarctic artist residency program, and the last part of the book is about her experiences there. The rest deals with sailing, mountain hiking, visiting the desert, and considering the meaning of animals such as mountain lions and bears.

Bledsoe is a vivid writer, and her experiences often have a gentle comedy to them. Not all experiences in nature are profound. Sometimes they’re silly or even stupid, and Bledsoe talks about those too. Those are some of the best parts, and it’s easy to identify with Bledsoe’s point of view. She’s got experience with survival, but she’s got limits to what she’s comfortable with.

Research Blog Antarctica #124: Surviving Antarctica

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Novel: Andrea White: Surviving Antarctica: Reality TV 2083 (EOS, 2005)

Surviving Antarctica: Reality TV 2083 is a young adult book about a group of kids participating in a reality TV show where they emulate Scott’s second, fatal Antarctic expedition.

It’s an amazing failure of a book. It reads like a fool trying to condescend to idiots. I understand this is meant for younger readers, but that’s no excuse for the singular lack of poetry in the language of this book. Every motivation and emotion is carefully spelled out in simple terms.

To make it worse, the scifi world feels like it was designed by refugees from the 80′s. The book has apparently been published after the turn of the millennium, yet features things like “computables” and “human faxes”.

Research Blog Antarctica #122: Ocean Enough and Time

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Non-fiction: James Gorman: Ocean Enough and Time (HarperCollins Publishers, 1995)

The pompously titled Ocean Enough and Time is actually an ok Antarctic book, another product of the U.S. National Science Foundation’s decision to take artists and writers to Antarctica. James Gorman is an editor and a journalist, but his writing here is more in the style of an essay. He considers the essence of the Southern Ocean and detours onto McMurdo and other locations on the ice.

Personally, I like Antarctic books asking the question “what does this mean?” Gorman’s book is short and breezy, and doesn’t really compete with the titans of Antarctic essentialism such as Stephen J. Pyne’s The Ice. On the other hand, the culture of the people who work in Antarctica is neatly on display, and its nice to have someone write about the water in a field where most write about the ice.

Research Blog Antarctica #120: Eight Men in a Crate

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Non-fiction: Anthea Arnold: Eight Men in a Crate (Erskine Press, 2007)

Also a contender for the best title on an Antarctic book, Eight Men in a Crate is the story of a supporting party on the British Trans-Antarctic Expedition of 1955-1957. While expedition leader Vivian Fuchs and mountain climber Edmund Hillary get the glory elsewhere, eight men work to build a base in extreme hardship. The story is small and personal, the narrative of those normally glossed over in expedition accounts.

Essentially a book about building a house in the middle of a blizzard, much of the time in total darkness, the book benefits from the private nature of its source material, the diary of the doctor Rainer Goldsmith. Unlike the repressed men of the early Antarctic period of Scott and Shackleton, Goldsmith talks about the difficulties of taking a leak in the Antarctic, his animosity towards the expedition leadership and the fears and hopes he has regarding his girlfriend back home. It’s not a self-conscious narrative of heroism like many of the more famous books, but a human story on a human scale.

The crate of the title is the temporary housing the men had while they were constructing the actual base hut.

Research Blog Antarctica #119: Ice Cores

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Non-fiction: David Haden: Ice Cores (2011)

Ice Cores is a collection of miscellaneous notes and ephemera about H.P. Lovecraft’s novella At the Mountains of Madness. Billing itself as a collection of essays, it’s barely a book at all, and the essays are just a jumble of notes and suppositions regarding some of the historical circumstances of Lovecraft’s writing. Phrases like “I imagine”, “must have been” and “this was probably” recur with such frequency that the whole thing starts to feel like guesswork.

Here’s my favorite sentence from the book: “One wonders what this free-thinking atheist might have thought of Ayn Rand’s science fiction novel Anthem…”

Research Blog Antarctica #118: Going to Antarctica

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Non-fiction: Robert B. Yonaitis: Going to Antarctica (2012)

Going to Antarctica is a travel story self-published on the Kindle. The American writer Robert B. Yonaitis goes on a cruise off the Antarctic coast, and in one sense the book is banal: we learn what happens every day of the trip, from its start in Buenos Aires to events aboard the cruise ship.

However, as a travel book, its everyday nature and lack of pretension is also one of Going to Antarctica’s assets. If you’re planning to go on one of the Antarctic cruises yourself and wonder how it might be, the book offers a concrete depiction of the experience on a very practical basis. You’ll have a comprehensive idea of what to expect and how to prepare.