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When explorers such as Ernest Shackleton, Roald Amundsen, and Robert Falcon Scott all set off to Antarctica in the early years of the 20th century, the polar regions were among the last truly unexplored areas of the world--and arguably the least hospitable. Scott lost his life, pinned down in a howling blizzard only 11 miles from his supply depot; Shackleton lost his ship, crushed in the ice. Even those who survived the icy wastes did so only with enormous effort. And yet, there is something about Antarctica that beckons people; eighty years after Shackleton's voyage, Sara Wheeler answered the call, leaving her comfortable home for "the Great White." Terra Incognita is the result of her sojourn in that legendary land.
In addition to chronicling her own encounters with the people and the place, Wheeler brings the past alive as well, through vivid stories about the heroes of polar exploration: Shackleton, Scott, Amundsen, and others who practically become secondary characters in Wheeler's account. But it is her interactions with the living people who make up the community--scientists, drifters, and dreamers who have settled this forbidding landscape--that make Terra Incognita a rare and worthy book.
Book Description
It is the coldest, windiest, driest place on earth, an icy desert of unearthly beauty and stubborn impenetrability. For centuries, Antarctica has captured the imagination of our greatest scientists and explorers, lingering in the spirit long after their return. Shackleton called it "the last great journey"; for Apsley Cherry-Garrard it was the worst journey in the world.
This is a book about the call of the wild and the response of the spirit to a country that exists perhaps most vividly in the mind. Sara Wheeler spent seven months in Antarctica, living with its scientists and dreamers. No book is more true to the spirit of that continent--beguiling, enchanted and vast beyond the furthest reaches of our imagination. Chosen by Beryl Bainbridge and John Major as one of the best books of the year, recommended by the editors of Entertainment Weekly and the Chicago Tribune, one of the Seattle Times's top ten travel books of the year,
Terra Incognita is a classic of polar literature.
Customer Reviews:
Words worth a thousand pictures.......2007-07-26
Sara Wheeler relates her months in Antarctica with vivid discription that as an artist I can "see" her experience. Any one who loves to travel will take this trip with her.
helplessly hoping in the white south.......2007-04-28
After reading the thoroughly enjoyable Travels in a Thin Country, I figured on some entertaining travelogue action in Terra Incognita.
Didn't happen.
What ever happened to the adventurous Sara Wheeler of the Travels book? After slogging my way up to the middle of the book, my level of interest experienced a whiteout worthy of winter in Antarctica. I realized, as I laid the book momentarily aside, that the reading was getting pretty tedious. A bad sign, usually meaning a book is targeted for the pile heading for the used book store.
Most of this book comes across as journalizing that never got the attention of a re-write before heading off to the publisher. The lack of cohesion that should be glueing this narrative together is palpable; this is a narrative devoid of any sustaining "pull". Terra Incognita is a muddle through a pastiche of the historical events of Antarctica although it is interspersed with some pretty decent reportage of current life at the bottom of the world.
Still, there ain't much to redeem the tediousness of this book except Wheeler's wry British humour. But even that's not enough to keep one's attention from freezing to death. Wheeler is encamped with predomitably groups of scientists; as such, this isn't much of a travelogue but rather a logbook of how to hang out with the transients.
I think Sara Wheeler is worthy of producing some real decent travel writing; Travels in a Thin Country bears testimony to this. Terra Incognita, however, is a big hiccup; hopefully she will produce a better read the next book that comes our way.
Extracts: A Field Guide for Iconoclasts
A thoughtful and intelligent travel book.......2007-03-06
This is a wonderful, beautiful book that takes you to a place that most of us can only dream of. The author has an intelligent and witty voice and can tell a good story well - there are some really memorable passages that stay with you long after you've put the book down.
This is one of those rare travel books that make you feel like you've been there yourself, so much so that I'll never have to pollute Antarctica with my presence, at least...
Stumbling to the South Pole.......2006-12-13
As a lover of all things glacial (with Antarctica holding a particularly special place in my heart), I was thrilled to come across this book in my local library. The book promised to deliver an enjoyable blend of history, science and culture in an entertaining travelogue format. Sadly, I soon found myself disappointed. By the time I was halfway through, I was struggling to make progress through what should have been an engaging read.
Wheeler suffers for the most part from a lack of direction. Her "travels" consist of spur-of-the-moment helicopter rides to various locations on the ice that fail to be distinguishable after the fourth or fifth trip. Indeed, at times the book reads more like segments of a blog interspersed haphazardly with snippets of polar exploration history or the odd fact about glacial ice or penguins. This is further muddled with somewhat contrived musings on American culture (they're all depicted like they're ex-cowboys from Texas), or anomalous personal asides that try to be meaningful but come across as undeveloped filler material.
Individual chapters have no particular structure or purpose, and so the finished product feels a bit like slogging along through the variations of the same thing: funny anecdote, helicopter ride, historical bit, description of another station's toilet facilities or the food they eat, personal aside. After several chapters of this jumpy, disjointed writing style, following the narrative stops being fun and feels more like work. This is unfortunate; Wheeler's writing isn't necessarily poor, but seems to suffer from a bad editing job and a lack of planning.
The anecdotes are amusing, the history fascinating, but when it comes to the science and the researchers themselves Wheeler largely fails to make a case for their relevance. Instead, they come across as slightly eccentric guinea pigs with odd-but-quaint obsessions. Still, perhaps the book's greatest crime is that she largely fails to capture the beauty and utter wildness of this last frontier on Earth, and in the end I felt no closer to Antarctica than when I first picked up the book.
~ Jacquelyn Gill
Hisdiory of Antarctica.......2006-07-23
This is a good choice for a predeparture read for people going to Antarctica as tourists. Of course, you can always read Shackleton's, Scott's, Amundsen's and Fienne's accounts of their epic journeys into the unknown, but that'll take you a long time, and you may be a bit distracted by the old-fashioned language therein. For a modern description of what life is like in the Antarctic nowadays, and what goes on in the head of a thirtyish female when she gets to visit (for free) with the scientists down there, you can't do better than this one.
The book is part diary of Sara Wheeler as she goes through some sort of change during her visits to Antarctica (three different trips during a seven month period, not one seven month stay as you may be led to believe at first). She's a bit too, hm, spiritual for me, "the landscape talked to me", to the degree that she suddenly decides to stop drinking alcohol, for no apparent particular reason. She describes her feelings well, although I wasn't really interested in reading about them.
The other part (and these two parts are closely intermingled throughout the book) is heaps and heaps of Antarctic history and "folklore". You get to learn all the basic facts about what happened to the pioneers and discoverers of Antarctica (with a VERY British bias, mind you), which definitely should be of basic interest to people who are going to Antarctica themselves.
"Travels in Antarctica" as a second title is not really fitting. She is not traveling. She is a guest of the American and British Antarctic Survey organisations, and is well taken care of by them, both when it comes to supplying her with equipment and with transportation. It is nothing like what traveling in Antarctica is for someone who pay their way through travel agents.
Still; good one, for what it is!
Book Description
Terra Incognita addresses the forthcoming transition in energy supplies and shift from conventional oil as the strategic energy source. It identifies the leadership challenges ahead and summarizes the lessons learned from interviews with more than 20 energy company CEOs and senior leaders. The structure of the book follows the planning cycle of strategic assessment (Chapters 1-4), strategy development (Chapters 5-7), and strategy implementation (Chapters 8-10) through a leadership perspective focused directly on the energy industry.
Features and benefits
This is the first book ever written specifically for current and future leaders in the energy industry that presents in one volume
• The understanding that recent trends are not sustainable, and that enduring energy companies will have to change to respond to new technological and social demands and opportunities
• Insights from recent corporate success stories that have demonstrated sustainable and profitable growth since 2001
• Interviews with CEOs of large energy companies on setting direction, executing strategies and leading their enterprises
• A profile of the energy leader of the future
Customer Reviews:
Finally a business book on management of Energy.......2007-07-02
Long overdue. Chris Ross and Lane Sloan have written a very complete book for current and future leaders in this important sector. With over 20 years of experience in the energy world I have learned new things from this book. Just the interviews with leaders in this industry make this worth buying.
A Candid, 4D Picture .......2007-06-16
Don't even start with the first page of this book. Start with the last two chapters, then the beginning, and read, and reread again and again!
Anyone that genuinely desires a candid, 4D picture of the changing and challenging direction required of today's energy leaders will find it in "Terra Incognita." It is high time for leaders that have operated with consistent and steadfast integrity to be recognized for what that have accomplished.
If you want to know what it really takes to secure the leadership mantle in any industry, Lane Sloan and Chris Ross have provided an industry GPS with the complete energy landscape.
Book Description
Immigrant writer Novakovich records his journeys to find his roots, some to his native Croatia, some no farther than Cleveland, where he searches for the grave of his grandmother, who refused to return to Croatia with the rest of her family. This moving collection reflects the joys and the difficulties in returning to a homeland left behind.
"Novakovich is a strong, original writer. His subtle prose makes me beam with pleasure, and break into an anxious sweat at the same time. He has mastered the tone of bearing witness as a principle of moral literature."-Philip Lopate, The Art of the Personal Essay
Josip Novakovich is the author of Yolk, Apricots from Chernobyl, and Salvation and Other Disasters.
Customer Reviews:
Plum brandy, plum dumplings!!!!.......2007-09-14
I agree with the prior reviews re: "Plum Brandy." For me, the final chapter on Josip searching for his grandmother's grave in Cleveland is worth the price on its own. Reminded me of my search (less complicated!) for the grave of my Slovenian great-aunt Marija in Saint Louis. The effect was very sentimental and uniquely personal. The memories of time spent and years since her death race through the mind. Glad to see another example of good relations between Slovenes and Croats. We are much more culturally and politically similar than different.
Heartbreakingly funny and sad.......2003-07-24
I laughed out loud at the wry and tender humour Novakovich brings to these intimate essays. Several of these essays belong alongside David Sedaris' writing about his misadventures in France--insightful, intimate, and heartbreakingly funny observations on our human predicament. Picking up this book is so much like sitting in a Balkan cafe with a long-lost friend telling exquiste funny / sad stories that leave you hanging on every word that later you swear you can smell the espresso, brandy and smoke. Reccomended!
Josip Novakovich is an extremely gifted writer.......2003-07-05
This is a collection of stories from an award-winning author who straddles two very different worlds. Born in Croatia when it was still part of Yugoslavia, he emigrated to the United States at age 20. He has traveled back to Croatia many times and spent some time there during the brake up of Yugoslavia. As both a native Croat and an American he was able to view the turbulent times of the 90s with the detachment of an outsider looking in and the insight of a native son. This book however is not about the war in former Yugoslavia but a collection of personal experiences that took place at that time.
In the following example he manages to tell us, in a personal way, something about the Serb rebellion in the Krajina region of Croatia. In the Guns of August essay, he writes: ýI took a train ride to Rijeka ý or rather I wanted to. The train was cancelled: the line passed along the Krajina region. I took the bus, and it went right to the Slovenian border. Krajina had squeezed the rest of Croatia all the way to Slovenia at one point.ý
In another essay, he describes in lyrical prose moments of his childhood in a Croatian village: ýMy sweating father interrupted carving wood and gave me leafy red bank notes to buy loaves. Yeasty smells drew the townspeople who were still fresh from rising in a cold dawn to the old bakery with its uneven walls and swelling mortar. Beyond the threshold, I saw naked and skinless white loaves slide into the metal oven above the random licks of flames. Soon a pale man sprinkled water from a crimson cup, glazing the emerging an tanning bread skins into polished crusts.ý
Josip Novakovich is an extremely gifted writer who offered me, the reader, genuine pleasure out of the simple act of reading. I recommend this book highly because I am certain it will have the same effect on you.
Average customer rating:
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Terra Incognita
Steve Mulligan
Manufacturer: University Press of Kansas
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover
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ASIN: 0700608877 |
Book Description
Long regarded as one of America's leading landscape photographers, Steve Mulligan here displays forty of his best and most evocative black-and-white photographs. Ranging from the Garden of the Gods in Colorado to Baja's Santa Catalina Island to the Tallgrass Prairie in Kansas to the Florida Everglades, he sees through and beyond the familiar to illuminate previously unrevealed landscapes.
"Terra incognita was the term used by ancient cartographers to describe those areas of the world still unexplored, landscapes of great mystery and allure, replete with the promise of discovery. This term has always charmed me for it seems to allude to the possibilities inherent in any exploration, whether an arduous physical voyage or an intuitive mental search. I have become convinced that everything in nature--including the most familiar and mundane of subjects--is imbued with a certain degree of mystery. By searching out these skewed and esoteric visual enigmas, by skating the fine line between vision and abstraction, I have journeyed into my own terra incognita."--Steve Mulligan
Customer Reviews:
EXQUISITE!!.......1998-08-24
Terra Incognita is a collection of black and white large format images of various aspects, grand and minute, of the North American landscape. This work establishes Steve Mulligan as a true heir to the mantle of Ansel Adams, Minor White, and other luminaries of the "black and white" photographic medium. Mulligan is able to see what most of us cannot, and is able to translate that perception into images of light, shadows, and darkness which touch the soul and heart as well as the eyes. Experience this book!!
Book Description
Terra Incognita: a Victorian/Pulp Roleplaying Game from the publishers of the Fudge customizable game system.
Forbidden Maps...
Mysterial Archaeological Sites...
Ancient Sunken Shipwrecks....
Welcome to the National Archaeological, Geographic, and Submarine Society!
Terra Incognita is a roleplaying game of exploration, intrigue, and mystery, featuring adventure-scholars whose exploits span the late Nineteenth and early Twentieth Centuries. Armed with extensive training, unpredictable technology, and unimpeachable discretion, Society members ("Nags") travel to the Four Corners of the globe - exploring unknown lands, investigating mysteries, and uncovering ancient knowledge. The Society studies and catalogs the information and artifacts so gleaned and sets about covering such things back up again if they deem the world is not yet ready for the knowledge or power that had lain hidden for so long.
So sharpen your Sword Cane, brush up on your Diplomacy skill, pack your Adventurous Attire, and join us in the exploration of Terra Incognita!
Contains all the role-playing rules and background information needed to play adventures and campaigns in the NAGS Society setting.
Customer Reviews:
A game with style and panache.......2006-06-20
"Terra Incognita: the NAGS Society Handbook" is a roleplaying game based on the "FUDGE" roleplaying system; it's written by Scott Larson and produced by Grey Ghost Games. It's a game of intrigue and mystery, in which you can sit around a table with your friends and play the part of adventure-scholars in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, exploring the world's ancient mysteries (and sometimes hiding them again from a world that isn't yet ready to understand them).
FUDGE is based on a simple system that uses words instead of numbers to describe characters' abilities and the results of their actions. This can make things more intuitively understandable for new players who aren't used to roleplaying and all the number crunching that many games involve. I'd never played FUDGE before playing "Terra Incognita" and it took me less than a half-hour to create my first character.
Terra Incognita is about researchers and adventurers scouring the world for new discoveries and ancient mysteries. It's very flexible within this scope, allowing for anything from pulp adventure to dashing heroism (think Indiana Jones), from wild gadgeteering to dignified scholars traveling the globe. Plenty of suggestions are provided for customizing your game. You can play it as a very serious game, or you can make it outlandishly silly. It can be a bit quirky or downright bizarre. The mysteries being explored might be natural (ancient Egyptian tombs) or extraordinary (an ancient civilization hidden away beneath the surface of the earth).
While this will undoubtedly make a wonderful ongoing game for people who love the genre, I think it's the ideal one-shot pick-up game (a game that you can put together at a moment's notice and run in the course of a single afternoon or evening). It doesn't take long to learn the rules, and as long as the GM is familiar with the rules he can walk players through them as the game progresses because they're so simple.
Character creation takes hardly any time at all, and you can use the templates if you're really in a hurry. The genre lends itself to simple, episodic adventures. And thanks to the information provided (and the familiarity of the genre), it's easy to put together a simple adventure at a moment's notice. The GM could probably create an adventure in the time it takes his players to create their characters!
Finally, an RPG that's FUN!.......2002-03-05
How often have you sat down to an RPG that promised fun, excitement and adventure, only to have everything turn out to be dreary, boring and bland. Too often, right? Here, ladies and germs, we have a game of the old school, where the main objective is to entertain you. Better, it carries it off in the grand fashion.
After wasting tons-o-cash on other gaming companies which shall go unnamed (woof!) with their endless revisions, TI has literilly everything you need to start an exciting game right now. And the Fudge system is so much easier to handle that most of the other gaming systems I've seen, I actully didn't need my pocket calculator to figure out my game stats.
I do hope this game's publisher, Grey Ghost Press lives long and prospers, but you should really get this game now, before it gets surpressed by the Gaming Monoliths!
Average customer rating:
- Money down the toilet!
- Europe's Survivors
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Albanian Journal: The Road to Elbasan (Terra Incognita Series , No 2)
Edmund Keeley
Manufacturer: White Pine Press (NY)
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
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ASIN: 1877727768 |
Customer Reviews:
Money down the toilet!.......2002-12-08
I was deeply disappointed in this dumb book, but I should of known better just by seeing the word journal in the title of the book. I was hoping to get some input on Albania and its culture and this book didn't do that. It was like reading someones personal travel journal. This book is money down the toilet, Oh well!
Europe's Survivors.......2000-02-12
Edmund Keeley's sharp eye and even sharper intelligence conspire in this slim if somewhat pricey memoir to suggest that where there are humans there is hope. This is a journal of of Keeley's short trip to Albania in the late 90s to take part in a television interview, part of a mutual co-operation project in which US writers are supposed to help Albanian writers to get their act under way and Albanian writers are supposed to offer similar help to their American counterparts. But the author's sensibility takes in a lot more. We get a glimpse of empty, weed-grown lots, refuse in the streets and a people totally unprepared for participation in the democratic process. Keeley writes about adventure and discovery and harks back frequently to the annotations of Edward Lear, the 19th landscape painter who found things even darker and dirtier than Keeley does. But the author makes it clear that hope for the future lies in the bright and cultured people who have still not sunk into the despair that afflicts most of their compatriots. Outside the cities there is still much beauty in the mountains and rolling hills, but their real beauty is that they roll into Greece, where the author's serious emotional energy has always been heavily and rightly invested. This trip necessarily involves contacts with stiff and boring diplomatic personnel and involvement in their also boring social functions. But there are exceptions to this: a few of the Americans living in Albania in an official capacity are genuinely likeable. The Albanian Bujar Hudhri is the principal interpreter and host for Keeley and his companions, and he is certainly likeable, but is put upon from all sides in a country where directives from above usually lack any sense of pragmatic reason. Interesting are Keeley's reflections and meditations on history and literature, inspired by just about anything, including the lumpy bed in his less than attractive hotel room. This work is recommendable for anyone interested in travel writing of the finer sort. Keeley always writes beautifully.
Average customer rating:
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Barren Harvest: Selected Poems (Terra Incognita Series)
Dane Zajc , and
Erica Johnson-debeljak
Manufacturer: White Pine Press (NY)
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
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ASIN: 1893996670 |
Book Description
Zajc, born in 1929, is one of Central Europe's most important poets and a founding father of post-World War II modernism. This is the first comprehensive volume of his work to appear in English and presents the entire creative arch of Zajc's vision from early poems to his mature work. Having been incarcerated in communist jails, Zajc's political resistance to the dictatorial regime gives his work an urgency that propels the reader into a vertigo of sinister and evil. His poems speak of the profound solitude that is the destiny of contemporary man, using the vocabulary of the natural world and of bodily sensations to illuminate both the mortal and lethal aspects of the human condition.
Average customer rating:
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Chaosmos (Terra Incognita Series)
Magda Carneci
Manufacturer: White Pine Press (NY)
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
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ASIN: 1893996786 |
Book Description
"Carneci's poetry is a carnival of sensory images, strong emotion and brilliant intellect. It is nevertheless moving, vibrantly accessible and necessary reading for anyone interested in contemporary writing in the whole southeastern European region today. Its conscious fusion of Western and Eastern European ideas and cultural influences is unique."-Fiona Sampson
Magda Carneci is one of the most innovative and important poets to emerge from Eastern Europe.
Chaosmos reflects a world that is chaotic on a local level but cosmically ordered on a larger scale, a chaosmos.
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Correspondance croisee: 1940-1981 (Coleccion "Terra incognita")
Jean Dubuffet
Manufacturer: Mare nostrum
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Mass Market Paperback
Dubuffet, Jean
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ASIN: 2908476207 |
Books:
- The Adobe Photoshop Lightroom Book: The Complete Guide for Photographers
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- The Crow
- The Film Developing Cookbook (Darkroom Cookbook)
- The Last Tycoons: The Secret History of Lazard Frères & Co.
- The Naming of the Dead (An Inspector Rebus)
- The Reproduction of Colour (The Wiley-IS&T Series in Imaging Science and Technology)
- The Same River Twice
- The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts
- Underworld
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