My Penguin Year
Life Among the Emperors
-
-
3.8 • 5 Ratings
-
-
- $11.99
Publisher Description
A "remarkable memoir" (Nature) of life with an emperor penguin colony, gorgeously illustrated with 32 pages of exclusive photography
For 337 days, award-winning wildlife cameraman Lindsay McCrae intimately followed 11,000 emperor penguins amid the singular beauty of Antarctica. This is his masterful chronicle of one penguin colony’s astonishing journey of life, death, and rebirth—and of the extraordinary human experience of living amongst them in the planet’s harshest environment.
A miracle occurs each winter in Antarctica. As temperatures plummet 60° below zero and the sea around the remote southern continent freezes, emperors—the largest of all penguins—begin marching up to 100 miles over solid ice to reach their breeding grounds. They are the only animals to breed in the depths of this, the worst winter on the planet; and in an unusual role reversal, the males incubate the eggs, fasting for over 100 days to ensure they introduce their chicks safely into their new frozen world.
My Penguin Year recounts McCrae's remarkable adventure to the end of the Earth. He observed every aspect of a breeding emperor's life, facing the inevitable sacrifices that came with living his childhood dream, and grappling with the personal obstacles that, being over 15,000km away from the comforts of home, almost proved too much. Out of that experience, he has written an unprecedented portrait of Antarctica’s most extraordinary residents.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Filmmaker McCrae energetically relates the 11 months he spent living in Antarctica filming a colony of emperor penguins for the BBC in this swift, but surface-level, debut. McCrae's choice to travel to Antarctica while his wife was expecting their first child allows him to contrast his own experience with that of the birds he's filming, as the females leave their unhatched eggs in the care of their mates as they depart to feed in advance of the birth of the next generation of penguins. However, the comparison falls flat and does not achieve the hoped-for feeling of kinship among species. McCrae is at his best when simply relating his experience of natural wonders, such as when the penguins all huddle together in the face of a threatening storm, a collective action which presents him with a "seemingly motionless mosaic of row upon row of emperors." Despite brief expressions of concern for the future of the Arctic world, most references to the changing climate are surprisingly oblique for such an existential crisis. Beautifully captured individual moments won't be enough to allow the reader to entirely warm up to this uneven Antarctic tale.
