Empire Antarctica: Ice, Silence, and Emperor Penguins
*Starred Review* How would you like to spend a winter at Halley? This was the job offer that led medical doctor and author Francis (True North, 2010) to spend 14 months as the doctor at Halley, a British Antarctic Survey station on an ice shelf deep inside the Antarctic Circle. In this lyrical book, Francis plumbs his fascination with the barren continent, the very blankness of which intrigued him, empty as it is of human history or cultural memory. Not only was the Antarctic solitude calling him, but there was also the lure of penguins—a breeding colony of approximately 60,000 emperor penguins was within snow-machine travel of the survey station. As the Antarctic winter falls and the emperor penguins begin their epic breeding season, the author writes of life in a research station in extreme conditions, 14 people lodged together for duration of the polar night. Woven into the narrative are stories from past Antarctic explorers, most notably the disaster and miraculous escape of the Shackleton expedition, as well as lesser-known biologists and their early notes on emperor penguins and the embryology of their eggs. Francis is an evocative writer; we feel the cold and the dark, revel in the silence, and find kinship with the penguins. He says to the penguins at the end, I couldn’t have done it without you. --Nancy Bent