The Entire Earth and Sky

More than a distant continent, Antarctica is a land of the imagination, shaping and shaped for centuries by explorers, adventurers, scientists, and dreamers. The Entire Earth and Sky, a kaleidoscope of legends, stories, field notes, images, reports, history, letters, and research, renders an impression, both vast and microscopic, of the effect of human beings on the land we call Antarctica, and its effect on us. It balances the reality of the frigid outpost populated by a ragtag alliance of international researchers against the crystalline dreamscape of a continent at the bottom of the world.

When Leslie Carol Roberts went to Antarctica for the first time with Greenpeace, she was hoping to save the world. In the twenty years since then, she has shifted to the no less difficult task of saving Antarctica itself, compiling memoirs and stories, learning the biology and geography of the icy land, and documenting her own journey. Roberts describes in detail the town of Lyttelton, New Zealand—the Cape Canaveral for so many great Antarctic expeditions—prior to the devastating 2011 earthquake in which it was the epicenter.

The Entire Earth and Sky weaves the tragic and heroic tales of nineteenth-century exploration, interviews with scientists, and the author's personal observations into a remarkable collage that evokes the beauty and the complexity, the perils and the rewards of a lifelong engagement with the earth's last wilderness.