The mettle and grace of the Victorian gentleman: Robert Falcon Scott, on his 1911/12 polar trek, endured incredible hardship, crushing disappointment, and approaching death -- and wrote it all down in a journal as inspiring as it is heartbreaking. In "Alone", a much better-equipped Admiral Richard E. Byrd suffers similar travails a quarter-century later, and offers up a mundane narrative of egotism, complaint and self-justification.
That Antarctic exploration has undergone a sea change since the days of Scott and Shackleton becomes apparent as Admiral Byrd faces his first crisis: the loss of "two indispensable items": his alarm clock and cookbook. Not even instructions radioed in from Oscar of the Waldorf himself can salvage flapjacks made without that cookbook. Byrd plods along, making mistakes the average boy scout would avoid, such as wandering off and getting lost. And we are left to wonder why he had not learned Morse code, his only means of communication.
The details of daily life are interesting. And the awful, majestic beauty of the Antarctic night shines through it all, despite the half-baked psychoanalysis and philosophy which Byrd ladles over everything. ("The past was gone, and the future would adduce its own appropriate liquidation", he sums up at one point.) But he fails to inspire, to ennoble, to evoke all mankind. It is all about him.
Antarctica has been blessed with chroniclers of encompassing vision, poetic insight, and literary ability. Admiral Byrd is not one of them. Read "Scott's Last Expedition" instead.

If you are looking for a book on an Antarctic adventure, perhaps there are better choices to be made. But if you want to understand the struggle and hardship of being physically and mentally isolated, or experience the terror of dealing with an unknown adversary, then I can recommend no better book than this one. Byrd takes what could have been an extremely dry subject and makes it read like a classic adventure novel. And it's all the more exciting because it's true!

This is a book for and by bird-watchers. The sightings of rare or unique Antarctic birds, their descriptions, actions and nesting practices make up the body of the book. On a cruise with eighty people the first author makes it seem a voyage of five, with a few crew members for convenience or local color.

The inset descriptions of wildlife by Ronald Lockley, a (then) seventy-seven year old well-respected ornithologist are very scientific, but he has also made them interesting to the uninitiated. His love for all species makes his science human.

Adams' writings are human, too, but in a less endearing way. Whatever is right, noble and just happened in this world because of the Englishman. The disgusting practices that threaten extinction of a species are being carried out by the Japanese, the Argentines, or other non-Brits. The practices he describes are truly disgusting; the fact that he attaches these actions to a nation and describes them as typical of that nationality puts me off. In fact, I was so offended by his biases that my enjoyment of the book was dimmed.

I learned an immense amount about penguins and other birds native to the antarctic. Having Lockley and Adams each alternate a chapter made the book quite enjoyable. A consummate naturalist, in the old sense of the term, Adam's does display his anthropomorphic side, which is evident in all his work (witness Watership Down, Traveller, Plague Dogs, etc.) and which he has never kept secret from the public. I appreciated him sharing the adventure with us.

I don't know how to contact you otherwise, but I requested this work, papers 1-3, and received papers 4-7. I'll keep 4-7, but please send papers 1-3 ONLY (and not another copy of 4-7

Make no mistake, this CD-ROM is not produced by NOAA. It is a woefully incomplete download of images that are publicly available for free from NOAA's web site...P>The only reason for buying such a CD-ROM is to avoid slow downloads of the high-resolution images. In this regard, it fails miserably: there may be more than two thousand hi-res Arctic and Antarctic images on NOAA's web site, and this disc contains 183 of them, and not very good ones at that. This gives you a less than 1-in-10 chance of finding the image you are seeking.

In my opinion, this CD-ROM is a cynical, amateurish attempt to make a buck by ripping off NOAA's web site and reselling it. It contains no original material, and the producer appears too have been too lazy to even fix the hypertext links they broke during the download. It doesn't even contain the master table of contents or search tables, so if you're seeking specific material you'll be forced to wade through hundreds of unwanted pages.

Amazon.com does not accept returns of opened e-books or CD-ROMs; if you have any doubts at all DO NOT BUY THIS PRODUCT.

Along with Scott's expedition, this at best can ber described as an heroic failure. For the want of an editor this Antarctic encyclopedia should be consigned to the nearest crevasse, but don't rely on this encyclopedia for the coordinates, because more than likely they would be wrong. Bernard Stonehouse should be regretting having his name associated with this ill-fated publishing adventure. At $ per volume an editor could have been employed to correct the more than numerous mistakes. A random examination of enteries for some sub-Antarctic isles reveal mistakes for every entry. Some of the maps are equivalent to the fanciful fabrication of medieavle cartographers - here be sea lions! The coloured map insert provides us with to entries for Davis station, one on the Ingrid Christensen Coast for Australia, and another near Scott Glacier with Australia and Russia as the proprieters. Moving on to Heard Island Station entry the coordinets given put the station some 15 miles to the east of it's actual location. The map for McDonald Islands is just plain fanciful the shape of McDonald Islands bares no resemblence to reality. Looking at the entry for Macquarie Island the map notes that the island is known as "Maquairi" Island. Hasselborough Bay has become "Hasselburg Bay." How many more errors? A much better buy would be a combined purchase of Trewby's Antarctica encyclopedia with Hince's The Antarctic Dictionary, at less than a quarter of the price of Stonehouse.