In The Crystal Desert David Campbell weaves together travelogue gathered from his many visits to the wind-blasted continent of Antarctica, along with natural history, oceanography, and accounts of the tortured attempts of earlier exploratory missions "in an alien environment, beyond the edge of the habitable earth." He's a gifted writer with an especially fine hand at making his readers feel right at home in a place very few of us will ever get to see. Armchair travelers couldn't ask for a better book, no matter what the season.


From Publishers Weekly
With a poet's ear and a scientist's eye, biologist Campbell brings the Antarctic to vivid, teeming life in this eloquent, comprehensive natural and social history of the ice-clad continent below the Southern Ocean. Over the course of three austral summers in the 1980s, Campell explored life "beyond the edge of the habitable earth," spending the last visit, in 1987, at a Brazilian research station--nicknamed Little Copacabana--on Admiralty Bay studying parasites in seals, fish and crustaceans. Punctuated with his personal responses (in the clarity of light after a sleet storm, he notes, "It is as if I have suddenly acquired the vision of an eagle"), early chapters detail local geology and botany, and chronicle the frenetic summer activity of penguins and seals; skuas, terns and albatrosses; plankton and krill. Accounts of the area's discovery and its exploitation in the seal- and whale-hunting expeditions that thrived 100 years ago are enlivened with reference to letters, diaries and other first-hand reports. Polished and passionate, with an immediate quality, this geographic portrait earned Campbell Houghton Mifflin's Literary Fellowship. Author tour. Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From Library Journal
While Greater Antarctica has often been depicted as a vast, frozen wasteland, marine biologist and researcher Campbell writes that during "the short erotic summer along the ocean margins of the continent, Antarctica seemed to be a celebration of everything living." A rare nonfiction winner of the Houghton Mifflin Literary Fellowship Award, he recounts three summers he spent on the Antarctica Peninsula. Along with descriptions of seabirds, walruses, and plankton, Campbell ruminates on a number of topics, ranging from his research ("It is snow-hailing this morning when I make my first scuba dive into Admiralty Bay") to sealing and whaling, geology and paleontology. Campbell effectively delineates the Antarctic with words as Ron Naveen and others did with photography in Wild Ice ( LJ 11/15/90). Crystal Desert will be compared to Barry Lopez's Artic Dreams ( LJ 3/1/86), but Campbell is a scientist who writes rather than a writer about science. Recommended for medium to large public and academic libraries.-- Jean E. Crampon, Hancock Biology & Oceanography Lib . , Univ. of Southern California, Los AngelesCopyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From Book News, Inc.
The author's personal account of his experiences at the Brazilian Antarctic Research Station during three "erotic summers"--erotic because the only sensible balance to the cold, life-threatening winters of Antarctica is an all out procreative frenzy--both for indigenous life and visiting researchers. Annotation copyright Book News, Inc. Portland, Or.


Book Description
THE CRYSTAL DESERT: SUMMERS IN ANTARCTICA is the story of life's tenacity on the coldest of Earth's continents. It tells of the explorers who discovered Antarctica, of the whalers and sealers who despoiled it, and of the scientists who are deciphering its mysteries. In beautiful, lucid prose, David G. Campbell chronicles the desperately short summers on the Antarctic Peninsula. He presents a fascinating portrait of the evolution of life in Antarctica and also of the evolution of the continent itself.


About the Author
David G. Campbell is a professor of biology and chair of environmental studies at Grinnell College in Iowa.

ANNOTATION

The Crystal Desert is not only one of the most eloquent books ever written about Antarctica, but one of the best portraits of a place ever published. It is a story of life's tenacity in the coldest and most alien of continents--a chronicle of events during the desperately short summer when the sun sets only briefly.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

The Crystal Desert: Summers in Antarctica is the story of life's tenacity on the coldest of Earth's continents. It tells of the explorers who discovered Antarctica, of the whalers and sealers who despoiled it, and of the scientists who are deciphering its mysteries. In beautiful, lucid prose, David G. Campbell chronicles the desperately short summers on the Antarctic Peninsula. He presents a fascinating portrait of the evolution of life in Antarctica and also of the evolution of the continent itself.

FROM THE CRITICS

Publishers Weekly

Campbell's eloquent chronicle of three summers spent at a desolate research center in Antarctica details the region's geology, botany and animal life. (Jan.)

Library Journal

While Greater Antarctica has often been depicted as a vast, frozen wasteland, marine biologist and researcher Campbell writes that during ``the short erotic summer along the ocean margins of the continent, Antarctica seemed to be a celebration of everything living.'' A rare nonfiction winner of the Houghton Mifflin Literary Fellowship Award, he recounts three summers he spent on the Antarctica Peninsula. Along with descriptions of seabirds, walruses, and plankton, Campbell ruminates on a number of topics, ranging from his research (``It is snow-hailing this morning when I make my first scuba dive into Admiralty Bay'') to sealing and whaling, geology and paleontology. Campbell effectively delineates the Antarctic with words as Ron Naveen and others did with photography in Wild Ice ( LJ 11/15/90). Crystal Desert will be compared to Barry Lopez's Artic Dreams ( LJ 3/1/86), but Campbell is a scientist who writes rather than a writer about science. Recommended for medium to large public and academic libraries.-- Jean E. Crampon, Hancock Biology & Oceanography Lib . , Univ. of Southern California, Los Angeles

Booknews

The author's personal account of his experiences at the Brazilian Antarctic Research Station during three "erotic summers"--erotic because the only sensible balance to the cold, life-threatening winters of Antarctica is an all out procreative frenzy--both for indigenous life and visiting researchers. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

Kirkus Reviews

A glittering, curlicued natural history of Antarctica: Campbell's literary debut and a Houghton Mifflin Literary Fellowship Award winner. Campbell (Nations and the Global Environment/Grinnell College) passed three summers at Brazil's Antarctic Research Station, in a land of surprisingly abundant life "hatching, squabbling, swimming, and soaring on the sea wind" during the "short, erotic summer." His research centered on marine crustaceans, but his canvas here encompasses all wild creatures of the Antarctic—as well as the humans who have hunted them to near-extinction. Campbell scuba dives in unexplored waters and finds an ocean floor teeming with "a bouquet of species" that includes anemones, sea stars, limpets, giant sea spiders, and more sponges than anywhere else on earth. He collects Weddell seal dung; visits a penguin rookery with its "fetal barnyard stench"; notes the "incongruous—and sublime" presence of fiery volcanoes in a land of ice; watches a "blizzard of plankton" at night and likens it to the swarming stars above. Superlatives abound: the Atlantic Convergence (the waters cutting Antarctica off from the rest of the planet) is "the longest and most important biological barrier on earth"; Antarctica "is the windiest place on earth"; the continent's dry valleys are "the simplest of Earth's ecosystems." Fossils excite Campbell's fancy (he wonders if we might find similar remains on Mars, with its Antarctic-like climate), as do ornithology and plate tectonics. He deplores seal and whale hunting as "carnage," and he frets about the Antarctic blue whale, now protected but perhaps too decimated to repopulate. Yet Campbell seems to appreciate the economic motivesbehind the great age of Antarctic hunting, and he admits to some edginess about Greenpeace—a nuanced position that reflects his firm grasp of the lovely, impossibly tangled web of Antarctic life. Fits nicely alongside Stephen Pyne's The Ice (1986) on the very slim shelf of first-rate Antarctic natural histories.