Antarctic Navigation

9780345402073

0345402073

"ALL THE INGREDIENTS A READER COULD HOPE FOR: parallel historical and contemporary dramas, a contest between personal aspirations and the powers of nature, the testing of human relationships under extreme conditions, and a magnificent setting." --The Boston Globe "THIS NOVEL, LIKE SCOTT'S JOURNEY, IS BOLD IN CONCEPT . . . . Morgan Lamont, the narrator of Elizabeth Arthur's novel, lies broken in the land of dreams. . . .Born on the fiftieth anniversary of Scott's death on his return trip from the South Pole in 1912, she begins her own sledding and man-hauling experiences at the age of five, when her Flexible Flyer slips away and she saves it in an act of youthful heroism. From then on, her life is drawn, almost magnetically, to the man and the last continent. . . .Arthur demonstrates great craftsmanship in planning and shaping her plot." --The New York Times Book Review "AS ELIZABETH ARTHUR CONVINCES US IN HER METICULOUSLY RESEARCHED, POWERFULLY DRAWN, AND DEEPLY FELT NOVEL, there are many beginnings and endings sealed within the polar ice . . . . Antarctic Navigation is more than an adventure story recast in contemporary feminist terms. It is also a bumpy coming-of-age tale: an exploration of the unmapped terrain of the heart; a flirtation with the complexities of ecopolitics, pacifism, and New Age mysticism; a dip into history, memoir, and science, and Arthur's passionate love letter to the natural world." --Miami Herald "ONE ALMOST FEELS THAT THE AUTHOR WROTE IT UNDER THE INFLUENCE OF SCOTT, that she so breathed in the necessary geographical, scientific, emotional, and spiritual aspects of that dreadful journey as to transcend fiction and spin reality. . . .So convincing that for several chapters I was deluded into thinking she was telling her own story and that she had actually been to the pole." --Beryl Bainbridge New York Newsday