Book Description
Travelogue, cultural meditation, and love story, On the Ice casts a panoramic view on one of the oddest communities in one of the most extreme places on earth. Sent to Antarctica as an observer by the National Science Foundation, Gretchen Legler arrives at McMurdo Station in midwinter, a time of -70 degree temperatures and months of near-total darkness. A lesbian struggling with a tumultuous past, she hopes to escape her own demons and present an intimate view of a place few will ever visit. What she discovers is a community of people stripped of any excess by the necessities of existence in a harsh land, where revered scientists are referred to as “beakers”; where cherished belongings are left without regret in a communal lost-and-found; and where women are rare but lesbians in high proportion. Forced to confront her own fears, Legler experiences firsthand how landscape and community allow a life to reset.
Customer Reviews:
At Home at the Bottom of the World.......2007-07-19
Nature writing is changing. The surest mark of that change is the fact that Gretchen Legler's book, On the Ice: An Intimate Portrait of Life at McMurdo Station, Antarctica, was chosen as the best book of environmental creative writing published in 2005-2006 by the Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment.
On the Ice is the story of what it means to find home, and heart, in the frozen place at the bottom of the world. With other artists, Gretchen Legler was offered the opportunity to spend a season in Antarctica under the auspices of the National Science Foundation Artists and Writers Program, to tell the story of the land, to try her hand "at making some human sense of its vastness and its terrible beauty." It was a quest, she says, not only to explore and discover new lands, but also inner worlds, "places that I hoped being so far from my ordinary self would help me find."
Antarctica as a place is extraordinarily far from the places our ordinary selves inhabit, and Legler wants us not just to know but to feel the distance, and to feel it as the explorers of a century ago must have felt it. She sleeps in a room that is only a stone's throw from the hut where Robert Scott set off in 1911 for his tragic bid to reach the Pole: "Good God, this is an awful place," he wrote. She spends time with other explorers who are looking even farther back, into the unthinkably remote geologic past of the Polar region, into samples of sea floor at Cape Roberts, goes naked into the coldest water on the globe, and ventures into ice caves in the Erebus glacier, blue caves, blue, blue "like an endlessly deep hole in your heart . . . a color that is like some kind of yearning, some unfulfilled desire, or some constant, extreme joy." And then there is the sea ice, glowing "peach and pink, nearly neon, buttery yellow, lavender, jade, and indigo," colors painted by Edmund Wilson, Scott's chief scientist, whose watercolors, she says are filled with, focused on light and color, color and light. And finally, there is the Pole, a "sacred destination," she says, not only for explorers but scientists and, yes, artists and writers, who find it the perfect place to look down into the mysteries at the earth's heart and up, into the mysteries of the universe, "the very farthest edge of darkness."
On the Ice is a luminous study of a remarkable place, a place that is so sublime as to almost defy human description. But as humans, we must place ourselves: we long to live in place and to make even the remotest place a home. And so the book is also about the men and women who live there, about the scientists, support staff, builders, workers, engineers, electricians, cooks, communications technicians--all the people it takes to make a home in an inhospitable place. These are people, by and large, who are willing, perhaps even anxious, to shed their ordinary selves and live in an extraordinary way, coping with the isolation and the cold and the loneliness, building a community of fellow-travelers, each with his or her own sometimes desperate reasons for coming to a place so unimaginably distant and different from the places where the rest of us live. These are funny people, weird people, misfits, heroes, people who live on hope and thrive on hard truths, people who have come away from the "real" world to invent themselves in a different reality.
But On the Ice isn't just about the place or the people. It's about Legler's own journey to the frozen wastes within herself, into her own frozen heart, which is thawed, incredibly, by the power of love. "How do you come to know place?" she asks. "How do you come to know self? . . . How do you let go of wounds and resentments and fierce anger, not begrudgingly, but as an act of grace?" She finds the answer to this age-old question in her relationship with Ruth, an electrician who helps her to shed "all that junk . . .all those layers of old self" and discover a new and loving self, a warm and passionate heart, in this frozen world. Some readers, particularly those who believe that books of natural history ought to exclude the historian's experience, may think that this part of the journey should have been omitted, as not quite worthy of the heroic spectacle that is the Antarctic. But that's the way it's always been, Legler reminds us: the personal has always been defined, she says, as "somehow gossipy or small, beyond or below the reach of proper recording." But why? Why do we deny the human perspective of place, since this is the only perspective we have? And why exclude the innermost experience, merely to focus on the outer? "Why obscure the intimate?" Legler asks. "Why shorten the story of the glorious complexity and depth of the human in order to make a neater, grander tale?"
Legler's journey--and her record of it--is all the more remarkable because it is an intimate journey, not only to the farthest place on earth but into the deepest desires and dreams of the human spirit. It's a singularly brave journey, as heroic in its way as the journeys of Scott and Shackleton and Amundsen, one more exploration of the truest human question: what it means to be at home on this earth. There are a great many books that will give you the cold, hard facts about the Antarctic. But as a book about place, a chronicle of life at the bottom of the world, and an intensely honest record of a spiritual journey, On the Ice is the most richly illuminating of all.
Susan Wittig Albert, co-editor of What Wildness is This: Women Write About the Southwest, University of Texas Press, 2007
Simply Horrid.......2006-12-27
I read this book while in Antarctica last year and had to force myself to finish it. It became a contest of wills to see if I could red the entire book. McMurdo is a weird place, no doubt about it. But somehow, while the author perhaps had the best intentions, it veered off into something that becomes rather incomprehensible. I spent over seven seasons on the ice and there are so many other stories to tell; the people, scientists, raytheon, projects, science, bureaucracy, idiocy, etc., that would make a great story. This book is unfortunately not a great story. Buy another book, any other book...
Her visit was intended to research the landscape; her book is about the crazy people she found there.......2006-05-20
McMurdo Station, Antarctica is home to freezing temperatures, months of nearly total darkness and regular near-hurricane force winds. It's also home to a permanent station, McMurdo, and for a season was home to author Gretchen Legler, who tells of this season and those who have journeyed to Antarctica to escape life. Her visit was intended to research the landscape; her book is about the crazy people she found there. ON THE ICE is thus about an exploration few others will make: you'll have to read the book to live her discoveries vicariously.
Diane C. Donovan, Editor
California Bookwatch
Horrible...Sorry, Really Horrible.......2006-05-15
I'm sorry to say this, but this is simply a horrible book. Gretchen Legler is too self-absorbed, too self-pitying, simply too selfish. Her grant from the NSF Artist and Writers Program surely wasn't intended to fund this whining drivel about how much her parents don't love her, about how she found lesbian love in Antarctica, about tangental ramblings that meander into nothingness.
Surely, it can't be about the prose, either. This writer, simply, uses, too, many, run-on, sentences...the overuse, of, the, comma, is, almost Shatner-esque, in, a, way. Here is a quote...one sentence, mind you, wherein even she has to remind herself TWICE what she's writing about midway through:
"When the first bit of core, real core, not just mud from the surface, came out of the drill, says Brian Reid, one of the bearded, bright-eyed New Zealanders at Cape Roberts, telling a story over tea in the camp's galley - when the first bit of real core came out of that noise, yellow-engine-pounding room full of small, tight men with hard hats, gloves, and mud-splattered faces, when that first long roll of dark clayey material came up, and when driller Pat "The Rat" Cooper, who's drilled all over the world, when Pat himself brought the core into the drill site lab, people started yelling all around, "He hit the hard stuff, He hit the hard stuff," well, you should have just seen it - "Pat and Peter holding it and jumping up and down just like kids, just like kids, just like kids."
Good Lord. That is ONE SENTENCE! Pages and pages and pages of this. It's maddening.
If you really want to read about life on "the ice," I strongly suggest Rolf Smith's excellent "Life on the Ice: No One Goes to Antarctica Alone," or Nicholas Johnson's "Big Dead Place: Inside the Strange and Menacing World of Antarctica." Both are wonderful accounts of the mysterious land down south. Neither will frustrate you, nor do they care one damn bit about why some self-absorbed writer's daddy won't call her. Boo-hoo.
Should be titled "How I became infatuated with Ruth (in Antarctica)".......2006-01-07
I completely agree with the comments made by the reader from Cleveland. This book is horrible! Roff Smith's book "Life on the ice" is infinitely better. NSF got ripped off funding this author.
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- An epic book on World War I
- Just shy of everything you need to know about WWI
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The World War One Source Book
Philip J. Haythornthwaite
Manufacturer: Arms & Armour
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ASIN: 1854091026 |
Customer Reviews:
An epic book on World War I.......2000-08-13
The book has everything you need in order to understand all aspects of the war. The first part reviews the campaigns, naval operations, casualty lists, and chronology of the different fronts. The second part reviews the weapons and tactics from both sides. And, the third part, which is truly amazing, the author gives detailled reports on all the nations involved. The author obviously spent a great amount of time researching all the information required for the novel. The novel should be highly recommended for anyone interested in this dark period of our history.
Just shy of everything you need to know about WWI.......2000-01-19
This is a pretty good book, with a lot of details on how the war was fought itself, on all the fronts. It's the only book I know of that tells of every single nation's involvement, like for example: Brazil. Brazil didn't do a whole lot for the war effort, but apparantly it did enough to get a place in the book. The maps are sorta tricky to understand, and a few more would have made the book a little better. If you like World War I, then this wouldn't be a bad book to buy, Haythornthwaite is one of my favorite historical authors.
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Page One: The Front Page History of World War II
Manufacturer: Galahad Books
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ASIN: 088365962X |
Book Description
If we think there is a fast solution to changing the governance of Iraq, warned U.S. Marine General Anthony Zinni in the months before the United States and Britain invaded Iraq, "then we don't understand history." Never has the old line about those who fail to understand the past being condemned to repeat it seemed more urgently relevant than in Iraq today, with potentially catastrophic consequences for the Iraqi people, the Middle East region, and the world. Examining the construction of the modern state of Iraq under the auspices of the British empire -- the first attempt by a Western power to remake Mesopotamia in its own image -- renowned Iraq expert Toby Dodge uncovers a series of shocking parallels between the policies of a declining British empire and those of the current American administration.
Between 1920 and 1932, Britain endeavored unsuccessfully to create a modern democratic state from three former provinces of the Ottoman Empire, which it had conquered and occupied during the First World War. Caught between the conflicting imperatives of controlling a region of great strategic importance (Iraq straddled the land and air route between British India and the Mediterranean) and reconstituting international order through the liberal ideal of modern state sovereignty under the League of Nations Mandate system, British administrators undertook an extremely difficult task. To compound matters, they did so without the benefit of detailed information about the people and society they sought to remake. Blinded by potent cultural stereotypes and subject to mounting pressures from home, these administrators found themselves increasingly dependent on a mediating class of shaikhs to whom they transferred considerable power and on whom they relied for the maintenance of order. When order broke down, as it routinely did, the British turned to the airplane. (This was Winston Churchill's lasting contribution to the British enterprise in Iraq: the concerted use of air power -- of what would in a later context be called "shock and awe" -- to terrorize and subdue dissident factions of the Iraqi people.)
Ultimately, Dodge shows, the state the British created held all the seeds of a violent, corrupt, and relentlessly oppressive future for the Iraqi people, one that has continued to unfold. Like the British empire eight decades before, the United States and Britain have taken upon themselves today the grand task of transforming Iraq and, by extension, the political landscape of the Middle East. Dodge contends that this effort can succeed only with a combination of experienced local knowledge, significant deployment of financial and human resources, and resolute staying power. Already, he suggests, ominous signs point to a repetition of the sequence of events that led to the long nightmare of Saddam Hussein's murderous tyranny.
Customer Reviews:
Inventing Iraq.......2007-03-10
Many would be quick to lament the fact that no one from the Bush administration read Toby Dodge's book Inventing Iraq. While it is abundantly clear that many mistakes have been made, Dodge himself states on page 158 that "for U.S. forces currently involved in attempting to reform Iraq's political structures, the libaries are full of books that provide no guidance. This is an important point because it underscores the fact that the situation facing the U.S. today is markedly different than one facing the British. Iraq was just coming into existance as a political entity and there was no sense of a collective "Iraqi" identity or nationalism when the British were involved. Also, Iraq's political development from 1932 onward would alter the society in many important ways.
You might be able to accuse Dodge of writing a book that told his readers more about his own beliefs than Iraq's early development because of his timing. This book was published in 2003 (right around the time of the U.S. invasion), and it has many noticeable comparisons between the British and American experiences. For example, he notes that the British thought they would receive a warm welcome by Iraqis just in the same way that the "flowers and candy" lines were tossed around by the Bush administration. These types of examples don't fill the book, but there are enough of them to make Dodge appear as if he's making a statement about the 2003 war.
Rather than going into an unorganized account of the British mandate period, Dodge offers an array of chapters that focus on particular details such as land reform, and the rural/urban divide. This type of organization will be a source of frustration for some because by focusing on these types of details, Dodge sometimes loses track of the bigger picture. This type of criticism has some validity, but the overall result is a revealing look at the Mandate period.
If Dodge is to be faulted for anything in Inventing Iraq, it would have to be his lack of a discussion of domestic British politics. He doesn't completely ignore this area, but no discussion of what's currently happening in Iraq would be complete without also discussing how events were being shaped in Washington. Dodge goes to great lengths to discuss what he calls "Oriental Despotism" in attempting to explain British actions and motives, but this is ultimately not as effective as analysis of domestic British pressures.
These minor problems notwithstanding, Inventing Iraq is a concise and well-written book that has a lot to offer to anyone interested in modern Iraq's origins. At 171 pages, it's a quick read and while prior research on Iraq certainly helps with this book, it's not a requirement. If one were to make a top ten list of Iraq history/politics books, Inventing Iraq should certainly be on it.
Inventing Iraq: The Failure Of Nation Building And A History Denied.......2007-02-21
great background history to today's strategic events in Middle East
Analysis of early "nation-building" in Iraq.......2006-12-12
This very useful volume's goal is an analysis of British policies at the end of World War I towards their new mandate of Iraq. Dodge offers a careful analysis of a British policy constrained by limited resources, limited political will, little on-the-ground knowledge, and a considerable load of baggage based either on other imperial experiences or a heady mix of Orientalist preconceptions and romanticism. The result, according to Dodge, was a series of mis-steps which weakened the nascent Iraqi state and set the stage for Iraqi history thereafter.
Although this work is primarily concerned with the period directly after World War I, Dodge offers some useful - if tentative comparisons between the British experience and that of the United States today.
Overall, this is a useful book for serious students of Iraq or Middle Eastern history. It may be too specialized for casual readers.
History repeats itself, first as tragedy, then as farce.......2006-02-12
Dodge's book is about the British Mandate over the newly created Iraqi state. But the lessons are obvious for the American invasion and subsequent nation-building effort in Iraq. The result reminds one of the statement by Marx, attributing to Hegel the statement that history repeats itself, first as tragedy then as farce. This book should be read in conjunction with several others, the totality of these sending a strong message that not even a superpower can fully anticipate and control events--especially when such a country never really did decent post-war planning (and that which was done by the State Department was ignored).
Consider Dodge's book along with: Risen, State of War; Bacevich, The New American Militarism; Packer, The Assassin's Gate; Diamond, Squandered Victory; and, dare I suggest it, Albert Somit's and my, The Failure of Democratic Nation-Building: Ideology Meets Evolution.
It will be interesting to see how the history books treat the American war and occupation of Iraq. I fear that those histories will be most unkind; one can only hope that the United States can learn something from this. And the Dodge book can help inform that discussion. Would that the author had done more reflection on the relevance of the British adventure in Iraq to the current American nation building effort in Iraq.
Orientalism redux.......2004-08-29
This short book presents the (failed)attempt at nation-building in Iraq under the British Mandate system of post WWI. In 170 pages of actual text, the author shows how Orientalist discourse colored the declining British Empire's perception of Iraq and the middle east, relying on templates that were formulated in the Indian colony and then applied wholesale and on the cheap (sounds familiar) to the Iraqi area. The book doesn't go very far in discussing the roles of the sunnis, shi'ites and kurds; it focuses more on the ideology of the colonizers and then briefly applies these sentiments towards the US current babylonian adventure.
This isn't the final word on European colonialism in Iraq, but it's an excellent start. I recommend reading David Fromkin's "peace to end all peace" first of all to get the total overview of the great power conflict at the heart of the reconstruction of the middle east and its continuing repercussions today.
Edward Said, now we need you more than ever ...
Book Description
This digital document is an article from Middle East Policy, published by Middle East Policy Council on June 22, 2004. The length of the article is 2450 words. The page length shown above is based on a typical 300-word page. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Digital Locker immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.
Citation Details
Title: Inventing Iraq: the Failure of Nation Building and a History Denied.(Book Review)
Author: Edward L. Peck
Publication:
Middle East Policy (Refereed)
Date: June 22, 2004
Publisher: Middle East Policy Council
Volume: 11
Issue: 2
Page: 175(5)
Article Type: Book Review
Distributed by Thomson Gale
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Inventing Iraq: the Failure of Nation-Building and a History Denied.(Book Review): An article from: Air & Space Power Journal
John Albert
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Release Date: 2005-08-01 |
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This digital document is an article from Air & Space Power Journal, published by U.S. Air Force on September 22, 2004. The length of the article is 1318 words. The page length shown above is based on a typical 300-word page. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Digital Locker immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.
Citation Details
Title: Inventing Iraq: the Failure of Nation-Building and a History Denied.(Book Review)
Author: John Albert
Publication:
Air & Space Power Journal (Refereed)
Date: September 22, 2004
Publisher: U.S. Air Force
Volume: 18
Issue: 3
Page: 119(3)
Article Type: Book Review
Distributed by Thomson Gale
Book Description
Scientists and conservationists are beginning to understand the importance of top carnivores to the health and integrity of fully functioning ecosystems. As burgeoning human populations continue to impinge on natural landscapes, the need for understanding carnivore populations and how we affect them is becoming increasingly acute.
Desert Puma represents one of the most detailed assessments ever produced of the biology and ecology of a top carnivore. The husband-and-wife team of Kenneth Logan and Linda Sweanor set forth extensive data gathered from their ten-year field study of pumas in the Chihuahua Desert of New Mexico, also drawing on other reliable scientific data gathered throughout the puma's geographic range. Chapters examine:
- the evolutionary and modern history of pumas, their taxonomy, and physical description
- a detailed description and history of the study area in the Chihuahua Desert
- field techniques that were used in the research
- puma population dynamics and life history strategies
- the implications of puma behavior and social organization
- the relationships of pumas and their prey
The authors provide important new information about both the biology of pumas and their evolutionary ecology-not only what pumas do, but why they do it. Logan and Sweanor explain how an understanding of puma evolutionary ecology can, and must, inform long-term conservation strategies. They end the book with their ideas regarding strategies for puma management and conservation, along with a consideration of the future of pumas and humans. Desert Puma makes a significant and original contribution to the science not only of pumas in desert ecosystems but of the role of top predators in all environments. It is an essential contribution to the bookshelf of any wildlife biologist or conservationist involved in large-scale land management or wildlife management.
Books:
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- Once Upon a Time When We Were Colored
- Outrageous Acts and Everyday Rebellions: Second Edition (Owlet Book)
- Pasquale's Nose: Idle Days in an Italian Town
- Pocahontas, Powhatan, Opechancanough: Three Indian Lives Changed by Jamestown
- Ponzi's Scheme: The True Story of a Financial Legend
- Scars of Sweet Paradise: The Life and Times of Janis Joplin
- Shot in the Heart
- Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar
- Stepin Fetchit: The Life and Times of Lincoln Perry
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