Peter John- son and a spare text Creina Bond and Roy Siegfried help to establish a sense of place, even if that place is al- ways shifting. Place a wooden stake at the South Pole, the writers ob- serve, and it will stay there for a mo- ment only: "Tomorrow the ice will have crept [several] centimeters."
Man got to know Antarctica slowly. One of the best accounts of the early voyages of exploration is Quest for a Continent (McGraw-Hill, 1957) by New York Times science editor Walter Sullivan....