Juhana Pettersson

Research Blog Antarctica #122: Ocean Enough and Time

By Juhana Pettersson|Antarctica, Books|Be the first to comment!

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

By Juhana Pettersson|Antarctica, Books|Be the first to comment!

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

By Juhana Pettersson|Antarctica, Books|Be the first to comment!

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

By Juhana Pettersson|Antarctica, Books|Be the first to comment!

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.

Research Blog Antarctica #117: The Third Reich in Antarctica

By Juhana Pettersson|Antarctica, Books|Be the first to comment!

Non-fiction: Cornelia Lüdecke & Colin Summerhayes: The Third Reich in Antarctica (Erskine Press, 2012)

The German Antarctic expedition of 1938-39 is famous for being the “Nazi Expedition”. This book goes through the voyage of the expedition ship Schwabenland in academic style, with plenty of pictures and illustrations.

The tone of the book is dry. It features an extensive discussion of the later impact of the findings of the expedition, and while the material is interesting, it’s also too technical for a lay reader. A rare detail is the impact of history on scientific work. Much of the work of the expedition was destroyed during the second world war, and the things that survive sometimes do so through bizarre accidents of fate.

The Schwabenland expedition is a favorite among conspiracy theorists, and the story goes that they prepared a base on Antarctica for Hitler to escape to after the war. This idea seems to send the authors into fits of indignation, and an entire chapter is dedicated to rebutting these admittedly dubious claims.

The Third Reich in Antarctica is not a popular book, but it is well researched and dispassionate.