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.विषयसूची
Cast of Characters 1
Prologue 5
ACT ONE
Part One | Departures 13
Part Two | Stalled 43
Part Three | First Passage 61
ACT TWO
Part One | Into the Ice 97
Part Two | Islands 119
Part Three | Between the Past and the Future 163
ACT THREE
Part One | Arrival 197
Part Two | Nameless Bay 213
Part Three | Underneath 247
ACT FOUR
Part One | The Quickening 277
Part Two | Holding Season 299
Part Three | Going to Pieces 323
Epilogue 345
Notes 359 Acknowledgments 392
लेखक के बारे में
Elizabeth Rush is the author of The Quickening and Rising: Dispatches from the New American Shore, which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Rush’s work has appeared in a wide range of publications from the New York Times to Orion and Guernica. She is the recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Science Foundation, National Geographic, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, and the Howard Foundation among others. She splits her time between Bogota, Colombia and Providence, Rhode Island, where she teaches creative nonfiction at Brown University.