Reviews
Alone: The Classic Polar Adventure by Richard Evelyn Byrd, Richard E. Harrison, Kieran Mulvaney
taetris's review
3.0
After Skyward, this is the second Byrd book I have read. It is infinitely more powerful than Skyward. Byrd describes his experience when he spent a polar winter at 80 degrees latitude in antartica in a shack all alone. During his stay there, he slowly poisoned himself with carbon monoxide and almost died.
The small scope of the story makes it very compelling and even the descriptions of Byrd's day-to-day life become interesting because he is in such a hostile environment.
The small scope of the story makes it very compelling and even the descriptions of Byrd's day-to-day life become interesting because he is in such a hostile environment.
magnetgrrl's review
5.0
Even though I've been obsessed with cold places for as long as I can remember and have long wanted to visit Antarctica, this book added fuel to that fire, setting my imagination soaring with visions of white expanses and the dangerous era of exploration. This is a fantastic and exciting read. I like to re-read it on warm days in the summer when it's too hot and imagining being alone at South Pole cools me down, or even in blustery wintry days when it's nice to be reminded that, hey, it could be worse. I also have a really nice hardcover first edition of this that I cherish. It has maps of the ice shelves as its endpapers.
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Update. I "re-read" this in 2020. I was going through a big "let's read every book about loneliness you can find" glut and started with one I already knew. I usually delight in the cold weather descriptions. But this year I just wasn't feeling it - maybe because I wasn't reading it at the height of summer in horrid heat - and I confess my re-read barely got me like 3/5 of the way through. I'll for sure re-read this for real again someday.
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Update. I "re-read" this in 2020. I was going through a big "let's read every book about loneliness you can find" glut and started with one I already knew. I usually delight in the cold weather descriptions. But this year I just wasn't feeling it - maybe because I wasn't reading it at the height of summer in horrid heat - and I confess my re-read barely got me like 3/5 of the way through. I'll for sure re-read this for real again someday.
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