The Crystal Desert

by David G. Campbell

The Crystal Desert is not only the most eloquent book ever written about Antarctica but one of the best portraits of a place ever published. Most books about Antarctica have focused on the lifeless ice cap that smothers two-thirds of the continent and on the heroic marches toward the South Pole that have pitted humans against a frozen world. The Crystal Desert is about the other Antarctica, the "banana belt" of the Antarctic Peninsula. The interior of the peninsula is. Biological haiku: a few eloquent syllables of plants and animals. The tallest plant is a lichen ten centimeters high, the largest land animal a flightless midge two millimeters long. But the sea surrounding the peninsula brims with life like no other on Earth. The Crystal Desert is a story of life's tenacity in this coldest and most alien of continents. It is a chronicle of events - of courtship, hatching, birth, growth, predation, and death - during the desperately. Short summer, when for three months the sun marches ar