59 Books Like Antarctica

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 motherhood, birth, and her own plans to get pregnant. Unexpected bonus content (and spoiler!)—the book contains probably the best and most honest account of giving birth I’ve ever read. 

This is a powerful book that I devoured over three days, deeply engrossed in both the Antarctic storyline and a back story about McNeil’s extraordinary childhood in another cold place–the Maritimes of eastern Canada. McNeil travels to Antarctica on the British survey and supply ship James Clark Ross then spends the summer at a British base on an island off the Antarctic Peninsula.

She explores Antarctica–with the help of a friendly Twin Otter pilot–but travels inward too, and the story becomes more and more personal as the Antarctic days shorten, and she is hit by a sudden and intense anxiety. Although our Antarctic experiences were very different, I identified deeply with this story, and learned so much from this brilliant writer. 

An ex-boyfriend gave this book to me for Christmas 1997, inscribed ‘I hope this book inspires you’. By 1997, I’d applied–unsuccessfully–to visit Antarctica as a geology research assistant, a PR officer, and a journalist. Meanwhile, the ex who gave me the book was accepted on his first application to film a documentary.

While I envied Wheeler for her successful Antarctic application, I loved the book’s strong narrative and personal reflections, though I didn’t share her fascination for bearded Antarctic geologists (there’s a bit of tent-romance in the book)–I guess I already knew too many of them. I loved what I could glean about Antarctica from this much more personal account of the continent than other books I’d read. 

This long (my copy is nearly 800 pages) and gripping adventure story obsessed me for a while, and I read it multiple times. I knew it was fiction, but I got so caught up in the characters, the story, and the location that it felt intensely real to me.

The narrator is a woman called Morgan Lamont, who is recreating Scott’s expedition, hauling a sled to the South Pole, and she’s still one of my all-time favorite fictional heroines. 

Author Susan Solomon is a senior scientist with the US National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration. She has uncovered what I believe is the real reason why Scott’s party couldn’t stagger back to safety. In the polar regions, the reason is always the climate. Even if you prepare carefully and well, sometimes it’s just too cold for human life. Scott and four companions were fighting an unbeatable foe, and they knew it. They died gallantly anyway, which is why a hundred years later we haven’t forgotten them. Solomon’s book came out in 2001, and she brings the tools of modern climate science to bear on Scott’s fate.

Robert Scott was a failure, and beloved for it. He died like a British hero should, gallantly and writing it up in his journal. He, and the four other men who died with him, are memorialized all over Britain: plaques, statues, museums. Huntford is the first modern historian to kick a hole in that mythology, pointing out the many mistakes that Capt. Scott made that, cumulatively, doomed his quest for the South Pole. Was it really sensible, to put cavalry captain Titus Oates in charge of the ponies but then not let him choose the animals? For that matter, ponies? On a glacier? Huntford contrasts him to Scott’s rival the Norwegian Roald Amundsen, who did everything right, breezed to the Pole with teams of sled dogs, and even gained weight on the way back.

A gumbo of meat (often penguin), fat (typically blubber), and maybe some crushed-up biscuits, “hoosh” is the catch-all term used for meals of desperation cooked up and choked down by different historical expeditions, and it’s an apt title for Jason C. Anthony’s engaging and unique look at a slice of Antarctic living. Forget Shackleton’s heroics—what did he eat? How did early explorers survive on penguin eggs? Exactly how desperate does one have to be to eat seal brains? Why is baking at South Pole Station so difficult? Why was the Russian base Vostok stocked with so much vodka? (A question that probably answers itself.)

Anthony is a support staff veteran who has done a number of stints at various research stations on the seventh continent, and his wry narration—which weaves historical accounts with his own experiences—is great fun to read. I only encountered this book after South Pole Station was… show more.

If you like books about epic expeditions, along the lines of Shackleton's Endurance, when the grand explorers of the early twentieth century had yet to reach the most remote regions of the world—books filled with more danger than fiction authors could imagine for a plot—tales of endless grit and survival—then you’ll love Alone on the Ice.

Combining his mountaineering expertise with his writing talent, author David Roberts brings you along with Douglas Mawson and his entire crew on the most incredible polar expedition, a complex story that involves sub-stories about other explorers and expeditions. (Mawson was a crew member on one of Shackleton’s early expeditions who almost reached the South Pole.) Unpacking the details takes a little time, but once you get acquainted with all these incredible people, you won’t put the book down. We modern adventure-seekers have a lot to learn from these pioneers. 

A gripping story… show more.

This isn’t a traditional travel book and not a traditional memoir about depression, but a combination of both. Her journey to Antarctica becomes a metaphor for her mental health struggles throughout her life, starting from childhood. 

What I love about this book, and her writing in general, is the dark humour, her acerbic observations and true understanding of how paralysing and perilous depression can be. She understands how painful depression is, the depths it can take you to and seeing your own darkness reflected by someone else is both comforting and validating.

Ernest Shackleton was Scott’s rival and companion, the one who was smart enough not to die. A later Antarctic explorer, Sir Raymond Priestly, famously said, “For scientific discovery give me Scott. For speed and efficiency of travel, give me Amundsen. But when disaster strikes and all hope is gone, get down on your knees and pray for Shackleton.” Shackleton’s last expedition was the stuff of legend. His ship the Endurance was trapped in the ice for ten months, and finally crushed by the ice and sunk. Shackleton marshalled his men to march across the floes dragging their boat, and then they sailed across the polar seas to Elephant Island where they finally were rescued more than two years after they set out. It’s an almost unbelievable feat.