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Terra Incognita: Travels in Antarctica by…
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Terra Incognita: Travels in Antarctica (original 1996; edition 1998)

by Sara Wheeler

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4811150,851 (3.98)28
i find antarctica really boring to read about. it's just cold and white. maybe being there is a different experience. the history of antarctic exploration was the only thing i found interesting in this book. i would space out while she was wring about antarctica and its people(her main interest?)and then come to for the history parts. at 330 pages it was way too long. there were only 3 maps and most of the places she mentioned were't on the maps so i mostly never knew where she was. did she? ( )
  mahallett | Dec 26, 2012 |
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In her writing, Wheeler has a knack for immersing herself in the places that she visits, and teasing out the stories of the location and the people.

She has been appointed writer in residence in Antarctica, and sets about visiting as many of the bases across the continent that she can. Her easy going manner makes it easy for her to fit in with the predominately male staff. She writes about the characters in each of the bases, and the antics that they get up to, and the way that they cope with the isolation and the climate. As people become aware of her presence she get more invitations to other bases. She is put with the artist in residence, and they are allowed to live a short way from the base to they can concentrate on their art and writing. The book covers the history of the polar exploration there too, and the narrative is woven with the places that Scott and Amundsen visited, lived at and sadly perished at.

Wheelers descriptions of the glaciers and landscape are very evocative, but do not hold back from the reality and brutality of the weather and the cold there. It is a beautifully written book, partly because it is one of the places that make her feel so alive and this glee comes across in the book, and also that her observational writing is accurate and measured. ( )
  PDCRead | Apr 6, 2020 |
Joy's review: The author spends almost a year in Antarctica and does most of what is done on the frozen continent. Wheeler has done her research as well and intertwines the history of discovery and exploration with her own experiences. A good armchair visit to Antarctica. ( )
  konastories | Apr 2, 2017 |
i find antarctica really boring to read about. it's just cold and white. maybe being there is a different experience. the history of antarctic exploration was the only thing i found interesting in this book. i would space out while she was wring about antarctica and its people(her main interest?)and then come to for the history parts. at 330 pages it was way too long. there were only 3 maps and most of the places she mentioned were't on the maps so i mostly never knew where she was. did she? ( )
  mahallett | Dec 26, 2012 |
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. ( )
  whitreidtan | Oct 29, 2009 |
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. ( )
  simondavies | Sep 30, 2009 |
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. ( )
8 vote TadAD | Sep 6, 2009 |
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. ( )
1 vote Othemts | Sep 9, 2008 |
This is the sort of book I like best: you go some place, you have some interesting experiences, and you learn something about yourself that chances are you wouldn't have learned had you stayed at home. If I ever manage to get my children through University (and one of them looks like he plans to stay there for at least 20 years, like his father), I'm going to become a travel writer and write books like this. I work with a bunch of the "beakers" Sara Wheeler hung out with, so I enjoyed reading about her impressions of these interesting people. The first two-thirds of this book were fairly mundane, with quite a bit of re-hash of books I've also read. But I thought the last third, when Wheeler and another artist spent a month on the ice not in the company of scientists was the best. The book took a turn for me I didn't expect. You can't ask for too much more from a book. ( )
  co_coyote | May 22, 2008 |
Sad to say, but this book just didn't do it for me. I quit after I passed the 50-page mark and still wasn't interested. I was hoping for a book that focused more on Antarctica, but Wheeler seems more interested in describing the people she met at scientific research stations there. She includes a lot of history of Antarctic exploration, but fails to write it in an interesting way. ( )
  cestovatela | May 26, 2007 |
excellent excellent excellent!! ( )
1 vote pouleroulante | Jan 1, 2006 |
I was her escort in one of her stories and she wrote me right out of it!!
  ziziaaurea | Oct 31, 2010 |
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