The Longest Winter

Starred review from August 29, 2011
2012 marks the centennial of the famous race to the South Pole between Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen and Britain's Robert Falcon Scott. Not only did Amundsen triumphâreaching the Pole just two weeks before Scottâbut tragically, Scott and the men with him never made it home. The British team, meanwhile, had broader scientific objectives for the trip. Hooper focuses on six members of Scott's team who were left on the eastern glacier with the expectation of being picked up the next year. After spending a year on the ice, they were ready to leave as planned, but the ship that was to pick them up never arrived. Left with few supplies, they were forced to make a winter trek on foot to reach Scott's back-up team. Hooper (The Ferocious Summer) explores how the stressful conditions transformed the relationships of the six men, dissolving class barriers between the three ordinary seamen and the three gentleman adventurers. This gripping scientific adventure story also includes fascinating details about glacial ecology.

August 15, 2011

The tale of how Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen triumphed in the race to the South Pole, beating British contender Robert Scott by only two weeks, still grips our imagination 100 years later.

It is a heroic saga of human endurance stretched to the limit in a continent so harsh that no indigenous inhabitants lived there, made tragic by Scott's death on the ice. Hooper (The Ferocious Summer: Palmer's Penguin's and the Warming of Antarctica, 2007, etc.) focuses on six members of Scott's team who were given the task of exploring the glacial area to the east while Scott's team made a direct approach to the Pole. Their adventures and the hardships they endured is, writes the author, "one of the great tales of survival." Although they landed with adequate supplies near a pre-existing hut, which served as their home base, the expectation was that they would be picked up by the expedition's ship the following summer. When the ship failed to return for them as planned, their supplies ran out and their situation begin to deteriorate. To survive, they had to find a way, on foot, through the ice, and reconnect with Scott's backup team. While writing the book, Hooper had access to the scientific notebooks, diaries and letters of members of the expedition, archived at Cambridge University, and she is familiar with her subject, having spent three summers living in Antarctica as a writer chosen to record the work of the Australian National Antarctic Research Expeditions and the U.S. National Science Polar Program. She vividly describes the glacial terrain they traveled, the ravages of the weather and the flora and fauna of the region.

A grand story of six brave men who literally and figuratively pulled together in their race for survival.

(COPYRIGHT (2011) KIRKUS REVIEWS/NIELSEN BUSINESS MEDIA, INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.)

October 15, 2011
As the 100th anniversary of Scott's tragic race to the South Pole approaches, Hooper turns her eye to the lesser-known work of the six scientist-explorers who were tasked with working alone for a year at distant Evans Coves while Scott sought his shot at history. A blend of officers and enlisted men, with varying degrees of cold-weather-survival experience and struggling under the constraints the more important Pole party placed upon both their supplies and support, these men were ill equipped, overwhelmed, and forced more than once to consider if anything they accomplished would ever be deemed worthwhile, let alone noteworthy. Hooper brings these men to life with aplomb, relying on diaries, journals, and letters to show their divergent viewpoints, frustrations, and fears. For once, Scott and the men who died with him are not the focus, as the science he had early championed was diligently pursued by those now criminally forgotten. Through Hooper's careful prose, Campbell, Levick, Priestley, Abbott, Browning, and Dickason live on again; Scott's Other Heroes, indeed.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2011, American Library Association.)