ANTARCTICA

This Spanish import via Germany offers glimpses of the southernmost continent framed as a quick tribute/travelogue.

Cuesta Hernando begins the book by describing a sea voyage to McMurdo Station in a faux journal format but is inconsistent about maintaining it. After galleries of Antarctic whales, seals, and penguins, he moves on to various Antarctica-related topics. These include daily life at a research station, climatological facts about the continent, a bulleted list of human-caused “Lurking Dangers” to the ecosystem, a discussion of volcanoes, a Eurocentric “Who Discovered Antarctica” entry, a page of arbitrary facts that does double duty as a glossary, and a closing note about climate change…at both poles. The facts have been strung together with little apparent sense of flow, a picture caption that mentions the Antarctic Treaty occurring several pages before the topical spread that explains it. Along with icescapes and wildlife, Martín’s reasonably accurate paintings offer views of McMurdo scientists (mostly but not entirely White) at work inside and out, a volcano, the Antarctic seabed, and the southern aurora. Armchair naturalists and explorers will be better served by the closer encounters described in, for instance, Sally M. Walker’s Frozen Secrets (2010) or Sophie Webb’s evocative My Season With Penguins (2000). (This book was reviewed digitally with 14.3-by-23-inch double-page spreads viewed at 50% of actual size.)

A disjointed jumble—the parts (some of them, anyway) better than the whole.