How could she stand being cold for two months?!?!

Alone in Antarctica
by Felicity Aston

Before I start saying wonderful things about this, let me first blast the publisher. I read an American edition with the imprint 'Counterpoint Berkeley', so I don't know if they're to blame or it is the UK publisher, Summersdale Publishers Ltd. Whoever was to blame, here's what they did:
    NO MAP
This is a travel book and there's NO MAP.  The continent of Antarctica has few mappable features--it wouldn't have needed to be a complicated map.  A simple line drawing would have been better than  nothing; better yet would have been a contour map showing the temperature gradients and the sastrugi zones and the crevass areas. But no map at all? Not acceptable.

It had color pictures so they weren't sparing the expense.  I don't get it.

I'd followed along with her journey via NPR, so I knew what she'd planned--to ski alone across Antarctica, from the Ross Ice Shelf to the south pole, then across to the Hercules Inlet. As the seagull flies (theoretically, of course, since they don't fly in the interior of Antarctica), she took the shortest route across the continent. But the zig-zag route came up to 1700 kilometers. (1000 miles to me)

NPR aired her daily reports via satellite phone, but the brief blurps told little of the trials of courage she faced. Her occasional mental breakdowns; her love affair with the sun; her amazing freaking will to endure and why the heck she decided to do such a thing in the first place--that's the subject of this book. She decided to sum up the experience with this:
 
Keep getting out of the tent.
If I can do that, each and every day, no matter the challenge, who knows where the next day will take me.