Product Description

Explores the physical and organic phenomena of the Antarctic continent as well as its history. With chapters on the geography and formation of the continent, its exploration, its depiction in the arts and sciences, and its geopolitical treatment, the author places the remote land as central to the

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #2166638 in Books
• Published on: 1998-03-31
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 428 pages

About the Author
Stephen Pyne is an associate professor of history at Arizona State University-West. He spent three months in Antarctica as a recipient of the Antarctic Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Customer Reviews

Heroism - required
The planning to buy this book was detailed and meticulous. Consultations had to be held with interested parties (my sons) and the wait for it to arrive was lengthy - at least ten days.
It was with a sense of mounting excitement that we eagerly surveyed the flat white cover of the package, I could sense our goal. I knew it wasn't going to be easy traversing 428 pages of a book titled "The Ice" but I had completed intensive practical training for this expedition. I was a veteran of Huntsford's "Schackleton", Huxley’s “Scott of the Antarctic”, Fuchs & Hillary’s “The Crossing of Antarctica”, the list was long but rewarding. Here was my biggest challenge to date.
The warnings were stark right from the start, the prologue uses half a page to list 72 ways to name ice. I stumbled and nearly gave up. Willpower, only willpower kept me going. I was becoming word blind. Reaching my first goal, the middle, I could only contemplate with horror the trials still awaiting me. “Great God, this is an awful book”, I thought as I turned the next page. I wondered if I had the stamina to make it, others before me must have faltered. My son looked at me, “I’m just going out, I may be some time”. I could only admire his courage, at having come so far. I ploughed on, yet another reference to Admiral Byrd appeared on the horizon. Until now I had been unaware of his supreme importance as an American and Antarctic explorer. Similarly I had been foolishly unaware of the fact that “…there is nothing in the Heroic age to compare with Ellsworth’s all-or-nothing transcontinental flight, even Schackleton turned back…” The fact that Ellsworth achieved precisely nothing is of no importance, he was an American.
Things were looking bleak, stamina was draining fast. A crevasse nearly finished me as I learned that TMW Turner (English) had painted sunsets. I began to lose hope, I was hallucinating, could he really mean JMW Turner who painted ships too, and trains ? It was my darkest hour, all hope was gone. I closed the book.
This is a book for the fanatical written by someone who equates flowery, overblown prose with literature, it is so bad it is almost a parody. If you want to read about the modern Antarctic, read Sara Wheeler’s polar classic “Terra Incognita”. The best place for Pyne’s tome is on an iceberg, drifting slowly out of sight towards the equator. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

Hard to read but you still can't seem to get enough.
Stephen Pyne is a difficult writer, but the depth and meticulous nature of his intelligence pulls you back to him even though you tell yourself to lighten up and read a good mystery. Three cheers to university presses (U of Iowa and U of Washington) for putting and keeping this book in print. The Ice touches on everything about Antarctica: the history, the landscape, the literature, the geology, the biology. The book is all-encompassing--as is The Ice that is its focus and deep passion. It's worth the effort, and your vocabulary will never be the same afterwards. You can read a mystery later.

A real gem hidden in the Ice
This book was a huge surprise for me. Indeed it was a heavy read (I had to use the dictionary a few times), but to my surprise I found myself getting drawn in by the author's enthusiasm for his subject and by his manner of writing. I found compelling the mix of scientific, factual and technical with his poetic-prose style. The book is logically laid out in the manner the explorer would have approached Antarctica: from the sea, to the ice-shelf, the feeding glaciers and finally to the looming domes of the ice-sheets in the dessert interior. This book deals not only with the ice itself but discusses the evolution of the fields of geology, glaciology and plate-tectonics and how they were influenced by discoveries made in Antarctica. The book is technical yet surprisingly easy to read thanks to how well written it was. A follow-up would be very interesting to put into perspective the effects of Global Warming and the recent collapse of the Larsen ice-shelf.