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Top of the pile
78
/100
I Index Overall Rating
Readers
82/100Critics
75/100Scholars
Author:
Julian Sancton
Publisher:
Crown
Date:
May 4, 2021
In August 1897, the young Belgian commandant Adrien de Gerlache set sail for a three-year expedition aboard the good ship Belgica to the uncharted continent of Antarctica. Drawing on the diaries and journals of the Belgica's crew and the ship's logbook, Sancton tells a story of human extremes, one that even today NASA studies for research on isolation for future missions to Mars.
What The Reviewers Say
Madhouse at the End of the Earth—Julian Sancton’s exquisitely researched and deeply engrossing account of the Belgica’s disastrous Antarctic expedition—is a narrative of cascading system failures.
Bringing forward the release of Madhouse at the End of the Earth before Covid restrictions were eased on the grounds that it was the ultimate lockdown read. Or maybe now is the perfect time to publish it as, venturing gingerly out again, we find ourselves succumbing to lockdown nostalgia.
In graphic and meticulously researched detail Sancton describes the countless impediments that pushed these men to the brink of insanity.
Mr. Sancton conjures the fug of pipe smoke and unwashed men in the unventilated wardroom, the taste of kjøttboller—spongy canned meatballs resembling 'soft, colorless gobs'—and the pearly sheen of fluted icebergs.
