FROM THE CRITICS

Publishers Weekly

Collier's crystalline account of his several recent trips to the bottom of the world aboard scientific research ships--and once on a converted Russian icebreaker--is 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 Cahners Business Information.

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