An intriguing, introspective account that shows why we “should care about penguins.”
A field scientist chronicles her experiences with penguins at the bottom of the world.
For de Gracia, “the crazy joy of remote living” meant five months studying penguins “at the northern tip of the Antarctic Peninsula, just above” the Antarctic Circle. Cape Shirreff, a tiny cape at the north end of a rocky peninsula, was her home base, where she and a small crew worked out of a penguin excrement–encrusted cabin. The author brings us along on her adventures, from battling strong, bitter winds to lifting penguin feathers to count their eggs and babysitting fur seal pups. In a compelling blend of memoir, environmental writing, and scientific exploration, de Gracia shows how “Antarctica, beyond the charts and maps of climate change, is, like any other continent, a place of grief, sorrow, joy, love, and survival.” While she was there, she felt a wide range of feelings and emotions, including awe, wonder, isolation, exhaustion, and boredom. The author’s frank assessment of life in this remote region clearly demonstrates her love of that very remoteness, and she is urgent in her discussion of the importance of studying the marine ecosystem. Though the work is often unglamorous—e.g., pumping penguin stomachs to count the amount of krill they have eaten—it is essential to understanding the ongoing impact of climate change there. As de Gracia points out, the ice habitat in the Western Antarctic Peninsula has decreased by nearly half since 1979. Research can help us understand how species are responding to this rapid decline, but the author offers a stern warning. “For scientists drawn to polar lands, the stakes are high: you will probably be heartbroken.” In this meditative narrative from the most remote of outposts, de Gracia reminds us of the interconnectedness of all life and the importance of viewing “ourselves as one species of many and our home as a living, breathing, feeling Earth.”
An intriguing, introspective account that shows why we “should care about penguins.”Pub Date: April 4, 2023
ISBN: 9781982182755
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Feb. 10, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2023
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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