Polar Books Collection

Meredith Hooper vividly outlines the challenges that face scientists studying global warming. Her book's strength lies in its lively reportage of some very diligent science, and a passion for the strange and alluring Antarctic is woven throughout' - Daily Mail, 'best reads of the year.'

Writer and historian Meredith Hooper tells the story of a summer season working with Adélie penguins at American's smallest base, Palmer Station, on the Antarctic Peninsula. The Peninsula is warming, fast. The impact on the penguins is profound. She tracks the thinking of seabird ecologist Bill Fraser as he and his field team build up long-term data on the lives, and fates, of Palmer's Adélies. The weather is dire. The penguins struggle. Crucial pieces of the jigsaw of understanding climate change clatter into place. An eye-witness account of the front-line, an absorbing experience of what scientists now describe as a tipping point, The Ferocious Summer uses the detail of the particular as a route into the big picture of climate change.

"Hooper captures the reader with the doomed efforts of the Adélies, but skilfully builds in the reality of climate change. Her book is so important because she makes this complex subject understandable and compelling....this is one of the most important popular science books to be written in years. It is highly readable and fully accessible. No reader will be left behind as Hooper describes the scientific work underway at Palmer." - Dick Ahlstrom, Irish Times

 

Websites

The Ferocious Summer: Adélie Penguins and the Warming of Antarctica, published by Greystone Books (2008) in US and Canada; hardcover, 300pp, with maps and colour photographs.

ISBN: 978-1846680083