The Quickening
Creation and Community at the Ends of the Earth
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- £11.99
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- £11.99
Publisher Description
An astonishing, vital book about Antarctica, climate change, and motherhood from the author of Rising, finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in General Nonfiction.
In 2019, fifty-seven scientists and crew set out onboard the Nathaniel B. Palmer. Their destination: Thwaites Glacier. Their goal: to learn as much as possible about this mysterious place, never before visited by humans, and believed to be both rapidly deteriorating and capable of making a catastrophic impact on global sea-level rise.
In The Quickening, Elizabeth Rush documents their voyage, offering the sublime—seeing an iceberg for the first time; the staggering waves of the Drake Passage; the torqued, unfamiliar contours of Thwaites—alongside the workaday moments of this groundbreaking expedition. A ping-pong tournament at sea. Long hours in the lab. All the effort that goes into caring for and protecting human life in a place that is inhospitable to it. Along the way, she takes readers on a personal journey around a more intimate question: What does it mean to bring a child into the world at this time of radical change?
What emerges is a new kind of Antarctica story, one preoccupied not with flag planting but with the collective and challenging work of imagining a better future. With understanding the language of a continent where humans have only been present for two centuries. With the contributions and concerns of women, who were largely excluded from voyages until the last few decades, and of crew members of color, whose labor has often gone unrecognized. The Quickening teems with their voices—with the colorful stories and personalities of Rush’s shipmates—in a thrilling chorus.
Urgent and brave, absorbing and vulnerable, The Quickening is another essential book from Elizabeth Rush.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this searching meditation, Brown University writing teacher Rush (Rising) reflects on accompanying a 2019 research expedition to Thwaites, "Antarctica's most important and least understood glacier," as part of the National Science Foundation's Antarctic writers program. She describes how the scientists and crew onboard the research vessel cope with heavy storms while analyzing samples of seafloor sediment and measurements taken by underwater gliders to understand how rising water temperatures are hastening the melting of "the widest glacier in the world." Amid the alarming science, Rush ruminates on the "ethics of bringing more people into the world," discussing her own desire to conceive in spite of anxieties about the planet's future. Rush also includes extensive interviews with her shipmates in which they expound on the vicissitudes of conducting research at the bottom of the world ("Persistent uncertainty is something you get used to," says one marine geophysicist) and how they decided to have or not have children. Rush's reporting is top-notch, and her personal reflections make this an unusually intimate account of climate change. Readers will find plenty to ponder.
