Book description
An NPR Best Book of the Year
Winner of the CLMP Firecracker Award in Creative Nonfiction
"The Quickening is a book of hope."-Elizabeth Kolbert, author of Under a White Sky
An astonishing, vital work about Antarctica, climate change, and community.
In 2019, fifty-seven scientists and crew set out onboard the…
Why read it?
2 authors picked The Quickening as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?
Elizabeth Rush is a beautiful, meditative writer, but she also knows how to swear, which I appreciate. After loving her first book, Rising: Dispatches from the New American Shore, I was delighted to find her next book was about Antarctica.
In a deeply immersive narrative that follows a 2019 research voyage to the Thwaites ‘Doomsday’ Glacier on the American ship Nathaniel B. Palmer, Rush writes honestly and seriously about climate change and how Antarctic ice melt is contributing to global sea level rise, but she’s also hopeful and positive about the future.
There is a parallel narrative thread about…
From Rebecca's list on Antarctic travel science and climate by women.
Ever since I was a child, I've loved books about the Poles, so there was little doubt I would read The Quickening. What I found in these pages was a startling new kind of story about Antarctica, one I'd never experienced before. As a journalist, I'm drawn to stories by other journalists who observe and describe the world through their own lenses, but rarely are these stories told with the immediacy of such a personal narrative juxtaposed against the immensity of an external landscape that looms large and distant and foreign in our collective consciousness. This is the honest, hopeful…
If you love The Quickening...
These Blue Mountains
A moving story of love, betrayal, and the enduring power of hope in the face of darkness.
German pianist Hedda Schlagel's world collapsed when her fiancé, Fritz, vanished after being sent to an enemy alien camp in the United States during the Great War. Fifteen years later, in 1932, Hedda…
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