Big Dead Place (Johnson)

Johnson has written an interesting and engaging memoir that combines trivia and historical facts about Antartica with a series of vignettes of his own experiences as a contract garbageman (yes, a garbageman) for Raytheon Polar Services. Johnson doesn’t have a lot of good things to say about the National Science Foundation or Raytheon, and he makes some fairly outrageous claims about how capricious Raytheon’s management of the polar workers are. He intermingles lyrical descriptions of the natural beauty of the area away from the actual polar stations with vivid commentary on how dirty, ugly, and noisy the stations themselves are. Since I’m not likely to ever go to Antarctica, this book will have to tide me over; at the end, I felt like I’d learned something, but I wouldn’t necessarily want to invite the author over for dinner.