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(Houghton Mifflin Company 1993)
Description (from the American publisher): The Crystal
Desert is not only the most eloquent book ever written about
Antarctica but one of the best portraits of place ever published.
Most books about Antarctica have focused on the lifeless ice
cap that smothers two-thirds of the continent and on the heroic
marches toward the South Pole that have pitted humans against
a frozen world. The Crystal Desert is about the other
Antarctica, the "banana belt" of the Antarctic Peninsula.
The interior of the Peninsula is biological haiku: a few eloquent
syllables of plants and animals. The tallest plant is a lichen
ten centimeters high, the largest land animal a flightless midge
two millimeters long. But the sea surrounding the Peninsula brims
with life like no other on Earth.
The Crystal Desert is a story of life's tenacity in this
coldest and most alien of continents. It is a chronicle of events
- of courtship, hatching, birth, growth, predation and death
- during the desperately short summer, when for three months
the sun marches around the northern horizon and sets only briefly.
It tells of penguins and seabirds and seals and whales, of the
evolution of life in Antarctica and of the evolution of the continent
itself from the land mass known as Gondwana. It tells of the
explorers who discovered Antarctica, of the whalers and sealers
who despoiled it, and of the scientists working there today -
especially at the Brazilian station, "Little Copacabana,"
where parties often last all night and Carnival runs for three
days.
Awards: Voted one of the best books of 1993 by the Editors
of the New York Times Book Review.
- Winner of the PEN/Martha Albrand Award for Nonfiction.
- Winner of the Houghton Mifflin Literary Fellowship Award.
- Winner of the Burroughs Medal for Adult Natural History Writing.
Reviewers' Comments:
"A work of flawless prose, in which the plants, rocks, and
glaciers of Antarctica are treated with the same particularity
as the characters in a novel." Edna O'Brien, The New
York Times Book Review.
"Mr. Campbell makes poetry of science, sometimes brutal,
sometimes sublime." Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, The New
York Times.
"Mr. Campbell is one of those writers whose powers of exposition
have been enhanced by the discipline of science...his descriptions
of the life cycles of penguins, terns, elephant seals, whales
and other Antarctic animal life are unforgettable." The
New Yorker.
"Not since Bruce Chatwin's In Patagonia have I read
so fascinating an account of one man's discovery of the far south."
Robert Carver, Times Literary Supplement (London).
"a satisfying, stick-to-the-ribs stew of nature-science-travel
writing" Audubon.
"Antarctica, its embalmed heart and teeming seas marking
the extremes of lifelessness and life, has found its poet in
the author of this scintillating book." Christopher Wordsworth,
London Sunday Telegraph.
"Fits nicely alongside Stephen Pyne's The Ice (1986)
on the very slim shelf of first-rate Antarctic natural histories."
Kirkus Reviews.
"An Adam looks at Antarctica...the finest journals of discovery
are a balance between the explorer and the explored. David G.
Campbell's account of Antarctica, where he spend three summers
as a research biologist, is the truest balance imaginable."
Richard Eder, New York Newsday
"polished and passionate, with an immediate quality..."
Publishers Weekly.
