Sara Wheeler, a British writer, spent the better part of a year in Antarctica as part of the American National Science Foundation Antarctic Artists' and Writers' Program. Her resulting book not only gives us the details of her adventures at various bases around the continent, but also a glimpse into the history of this continent and its various loved and deplored explorers. I thought this was very well researched and I enjoyed Wheeler's method of interspersing Antarctic history with her own adventures. Having an "outsider" tell of what it's like to live on the continent is as close to the real experience as someone like me will ever get. Her love of the continent really shined through as well. ( )

It probably takes an odd duck to think that traveling to Antarctica would be simply amazing. I am that odd duck. I would love to one day visit this ice bound continent. And that's not likely to happen any time soon so reading about someone who did make that trip is next best. And if I'm an odd duck for thinking I'd love to go, Sara Wheeler is probably an even odder duck (or perhaps that should be odder penguin) for having gone.

The book is both a travel memoir and a history of man's famed and forgotten travels in the frozen south. Wheeler interweaves her own travels, planned and spur of the moment, through the icy continent, visiting scientific bases and outposts, learning about the realities of life on the ice now with excerpts from Scott and Aumundsen and Shackleton's journeys. The historical information is never overwhelming, instead adding dimension to the experiences that Wheeler herself has in her journeys through Antarctica. Both the modern day and historical travels are fascinating. Wheeler also spends much time describing the other people who live and work on the ice. All of them are clearly a breed apart and all are moved by their time on the ice.

This is more contemplative than many travelogues but it is no less descriptive than most for taking place in a landscape that is, on first impression, so uniform. Wheeler captures the hardships that plague life on the ice in vivid language but she also celebrates this still so unknown continent also. Wheeler's trip to the actual South Pole is merely one instance of her travels around and given no more importance than her other camp visits. Her final weeks, spent with only one artist companion, in a hut set aside for their creative endeavors offers a sense of peace and closure to the end of her journeyings. Readers with an interest in history and the Antarctic will enjoy this slow and thorough narrative of a summer (and part of a winter) in the south. ( )

Amazing read. Funny, intelligent and enlightening. A trip to Antarctica is in order, I feel. You sometimes need a dictionary for some of the obtuse words she uses. ( )

This is a book that has sat on my shelf for a number of years, awaiting that moment when I was in the mood for an Exploration Memoir. I had a certain degree of high expectation about the book based upon initial reviews that talked about a "rare" and "extraordinary" book. After finishing the book, I can't quibble with "rare"—how many authors have travel books about Antarctica, after all? I do, however, disagree with the "extraordinary" part.

Ms. Wheeler does some things quite well. The book is full of stories about Amundsen, Scott, Shackleton, Wilson and a host of other figures from the early days of polar exploration. These stories are timed beautifully and go into just enough depth that they bring those early days to life. Rather than being a distraction from her adventures, they serve as a backdrop that provides color and contrast to the present.

She does an equally good job of giving you a picture of what life is like now, filling the book with tiny little details that turn abstract facts into vivid images—calling -50°C "cold" is true, but abstract; saying that -10°C "had come to seem tropical" is only slightly more real; saying that they threw a cup of boiling water in the air and it hit the ground as ice makes it all very clear.

The book is also full of a fair amount of humor at life in this extreme environment, ranging from the simply amusing (hang your clothes by a quick lick on the collar and then pressing them against the ice-covered walls of the cabin) through the faintly appalling ("solids only" outhouses that can short out and electrocute you if you deposit liquids).

There is no central theme or defining journey in this book. Her adventures were mostly spur-of-the-moment, taking advantage of opportunities to visit this station or that as they presented themselves. Rather than feeling diffuse, I think this worked well. It gave the book a real feeling of "I want to see everything!" as she moved from helping unload cargo to apprenticing at one scientific site or another.

Yet, the book fails to reach "extraordinary."

She is, at times, mean-spirited. The inhabitants of the Antarctic stations are mostly male and, of course, any largely-single-sex environment is going to provide amusement or annoyance to members of the opposite gender...depending upon how much they are affected by it. However, her tone was not one of amusement or even irritation; it was one of unending condescension and superciliousness. Her British hosts (she was a guest at several national camps during her time in Antarctica) come in for particular slighting. This appears to have been triggered by the fact that she wasn't made much of on her arrival (though it's not explicit, my reading of the events is that she arrived during the changeover period when those who had been isolated for nine months by the winter finally got to see their friends again) and wasn't immediately made an intimate in a group of individuals who had spent months and years isolated together.

I also found the story a little too mawkish. There are those books where the author articulates a spiritual journey and I find them fascinating. However, I'm not so fond of those books where the author substitutes a vague sentimentality instead of finding words to describe something meaningful. A paragraph ending in "The dignity of the landscape infused our minds like a symphony; I heard another music in those days." is fine...a pretty, poetic picture. However, when these types of paragraphs occur every few pages throughout a 341 page book, when "the landscape spoke to me so directly that I no longer seemed to be made of ice" is succeeded by "It's as though God has given me a gift, once in my life, to step off the planet for two months and listen to a different music," it becomes tiresome. By the end, I found that my mind would skim these paragraphs rather than savor them.

It's not a perfect book. However, Ms. Wheeler writes well and does make the continent come alive. There are so few contemporary books about travels in the Antarctic, and even fewer written from a woman's perspective, that I would recommend this one. ( )

Representing Cold for the Book-a-month Challenge is Sara Wheeler's Terra Incognita: Travels In Antarctica (1996). Just for kicks I'm going to make it the Around the World for a Good Book selection for Antarctica as well. As the subtitle states, this is a travel book to the forbidding, ownerless continent at the southernmost part of the planet. For the most part that means visiting scientific research station. I'm surprised how many research stations exist and how many people live and work there. The stations seem well out-fitted (all of them have a bar) and served by frequent flights. Wheeler even flies to the South Pole which feels a bit anticlimactic.

Among the vast deserts of ice are the well-preserved huts of the early explorers of Antarctica's heroic age. It's hard to believe that they still stand with the explorers' provisions still on the shelves. Wheeler visits these historic relics and weaves the stories of Scott, Shackleton, Amundsen, Mawson, Cherry-Garrard and Byrd with her own.

The last portion of the book where Wheeler spends a season on the ice with an artist at their own camp is particularly impressive. I give this book high marks for insight and originality. ( )