Synopses & Reviews
Antarctica is a vast, desolate place that is truly unlike any other on earth. Featuring a 1300-mile-long mountain range, 200 mph winds, and less precipitation than the Sahara Desert, the continent is both forbidding and spectacular. Author William Fox spent months traveling and studying this massive continent, and in Terra Antarctica he has combined his experiences with the rich artistic and scientific history of Antarctica in an attempt to understand this amazing place. Fox recounts unnerving experiences like being caught in a whiteout, camping on the volcano Mount Erebus during a hurricane, and taking frigid hikes past the edge of the mapped world. Fox also relates conversations with other researchers he encounters during his travels, and analyzes how our understanding of Antarctica has impacted our understanding of ourselves. Insightful and penetrating, Terra Antarctica combines multiple lines of study to reveal how humans have come to understand one of the world's strangest places.
Synopsis
How does the human mind transform space into place, or land into landscape? For more than three decades, William L. Fox has looked at empty landscapes and the role of the arts to investigate the way humans make sense of space. In Terra Antarctica, Fox continues this line of inquiry as he travels to the Antarctic, the largest and most extreme desert on earth.” This contemporary travel narrative interweaves artistic, cartographic, and scientific images with anecdotes from the author's three-month journey in the Antarctic to create an absorbing and readable narrative of the remote continent. Through its images, history, and firsthand experiencessnowmobile trips through whiteouts and his icy solo hikes past the edge of the mapped worldFox brings to life a place that few have seen and offers us a look into both the nature of landscape and ourselves.