Will I love The Quickening?

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… show more.

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… show more.