The Crystal Desert

November 30, 1992
With a poet's ear and a scientist's eye, biologist Campbell brings the Antarctic to vivid, teeming life in this eloquent, comprehensive natural and social history of the ice-clad continent below the Southern Ocean. Over the course of three austral summers in the 1980s, Campell explored life ``beyond the edge of the habitable earth,'' spending the last visit, in 1987, at a Brazilian research station--nicknamed Little Copacabana--on Admiralty Bay studying parasites in seals, fish and crustaceans. Punctuated with his personal responses (in the clarity of light after a sleet storm, he notes, ``It is as if I have suddenly acquired the vision of an eagle''), early chapters detail local geology and botany, and chronicle the frenetic summer activity of penguins and seals; skuas, terns and albatrosses; plankton and krill. Accounts of the area's discovery and its exploitation in the seal- and whale-hunting expeditions that thrived 100 years ago are enlivened with reference to letters, diaries and other first-hand reports. Polished and passionate, with an immediate quality, this geographic portrait earned Campbell Houghton Mifflin's Literary Fellowship. Author tour.