The Last Cold Place
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15
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Lab Girl meets Why Fish Don’t Exist in this brilliant, fascinating memoir about a young scientist’s experience studying penguins in Antarctica—a firsthand account of the beauty and brutality of this remote climate, the direct effects of climate change on animals, and the challenges of fieldwork. Naira de Gracia’s The Last Cold Place offers a dramatic, captivating window into a once-in-a-lifetime experience: a season living and working in a remote outpost in Antarctica alongside seals, penguins, and a small crew of fellow field workers. In one of the most inhospitable environments in the world (for humans, anyway), Naira follows a generation of chinstrap penguins from their parents’ return to shore to build nests from pebbles until the chicks themselves are old enough to head out to sea. In lively and entertaining anecdotes, Naira describes the life cycle of a funny, engaging colony of chinstrap penguins whose food source (krill, or small crustaceans) is powerfully affected by the changing ocean. Weaving together the history of Antarctic exploration with climate science, field observations, and her own personal journey of growth and reflection, The Last Cold Place illuminates the complex place that Antarctica holds in our cultural imagination—and offers a rare glimpse into life on this uninhabited continent.
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Slapping The Only Tattoist On Antarctica. This was an excellent blend of memoir, science, humor, and reality from someone living a very isolated life for several months at a time - living with a handful of people, a lot of wild animals, and with no chance of resupply for weeks on end, no matter what. Referencing the relevant histories (as a Gen Z college student would, anyway) and combining them in ways very familiar with similar campaign memoirs of both soldiers and scientists of old and new - everything from Captain Shackleton and his expedition (whose story is summarized here) to Nathaniel Fick to International Space Station Commanders Scott Kelly (whose book, Endurance, also references the doomed Shackleton expedition) and Chris Hadfield. The exact science of penguin biology isn't covered as precisely as in say Lloyd Spencer Davis' 2019 text A Polar Affair, and yet the practicalities of collecting the data the science relies on *are* covered in much more depth here - more akin to Kelly and Hadfields' descriptions of life on the ISS. Overall an interesting tale of a life few will ever get to live, and a fascinating look at Antarctic science and the lives of the technicians gathering the data in some of the harshest climates on Earth. The only thing I can really knock this text over is the dearth of its bibliography, coming in at less than 10% of the text when even 20% is much more usual, even for more memoir based books such as this. Still, truly a fascinating and quick read, and very much recommended.
