MY ANTARCTICA

A lively and revealing visit to our remotest continent.

Childhood dreams of being an explorer went nowhere, Neri writes, but as an adult, he had a chance to realize his ambitions by taking a grant-funded trip to Antarctica. Along with other artists and writers, he joined researchers (“mostly white, but I see a few folks of color like me”) living and working at McMurdo Station to record discoveries and impressions. Funny and informative as his comments are, though, it’s his photos, which are joined by others drawn from a multitude of sources and mounted here as snapshots, that really bring the forbidding locale to life…particularly since Wilkin enhances many of them with superimposed cartoon images that catch the author looking on as scientists engage in a range of specifically described projects, meeting penguins, imagining flights over rapidly melting ice, urgently surveying a photo gallery of outdoor loos (brrr), and, all too soon, cheerily waving goodbye. Maps, galleries of rugged vehicles and outerwear, lists of things visitors to the station will find (a coffee shop, an ATM) and won’t (polar bears, guns), and multiple closing factual roundups will give armchair travelers all the more incentive to put trips to the still largely unexplored continent on their bucket lists.

Warm memories of really cold places and the people who brave them for science.