I read this book: The Survivors
Project: The Total Library

I just finished a book that I must reccomend. It is called The Survivors. I feel so down since I finished this book. It is the essence of everything I love about books lately. Adventure, suspense...

I bought The Survivors along with Rendezvous with Rama, another gem from Counterpoint. I mean, it was on the vintage paperback shelf. I paid $1 for this book. I bought it solely on the cover. Perhaps my greatest find at a used bookstore.

I am deeply obsessed with polar regions for the same reason I'm obsessed with the ocean and outer space. It's the unknown, it cannot be contained. We cannot really grasp it, even with our thoughts. It is the sublime. It is beautiful and bleak.

Polar regions have incredible occurrences that only happen at the poles. Auroras? High concentration of meteorites? Yeah! Talk about feeling small. The thought of it all overwhelms me.

The Survivors follows the story of Duncan Craig, who left his job in London in search of something new. He travels to South Africa where he thinks he will be able to find work. The work he finds is far different than he imagines. He becomes a skipper of a catcher in a whaling fleet. The circumstances in which he becomes employed are sketchy. There is a lot of unrest in the fleet and speculation of murder and wrong doing. There is a rush to get out into the Atlantic and sort out all the trouble.

As the story begins to become monotonous, Craig goes into the floes in rescue of another catcher whose hull was cracked from the ice. This simple rescue escalates and many ships go down, including the large factory ship The Southern Cross. With over 500 men on the ice, they must figure out how to survive without freezing to death or being crushed by the icebergs moving through the floes. Whoa! You begin to get an idea of what it would be like to be stranded on the ice, how small we are in the scheme of things, how little control we actually have.

And this is the real deal. While researching this post I came across this blurb about the author: "Hammond Innes was a writer who made a point of researching the material for his adventures in great depth. If he was writing about oil-rigs then he spent time on an oil-rig; if about the Antarctic then he spent time in the frozen South."1 Hammond Innes had personal contact with the forces of the Antarctic. He witnessed the magnitude of the ice. I can't imagine anything more perfect. This book is "a rousing adventure yarn of derring-do on the Antarctic" written by an author who experienced it first hand.

1 Asto

Fri, Apr 11, 2008  Permanent link
Categories: Antarctic, Bland, Disaster Camp, Duncan Craig, Hammond Innes, Nordahl, Southern Cross, The Survivors, Whaling
Sent to project: The Total Library