This largely autobiographical work using the hook of a voyage to the Antarctic Peninsula aboard the tourist ship, Academik Vavilov, to explore the pained relation of the author to her parents, and her own daughter’s efforts to explore those relationships. The somewhat mean-spirited passages on the sea voyage to South Georgia and the Peninsula are outweighed by the psychological exploration of troubled parental relations. In essence there is little about Antarctica beyond descriptions of tourists and penguins, nothing about reading, and a bit about boredom.
David H. Stam's Anthologies of the Reading Experience