Chappell was part of a program to send Boy Scouts on Antarctic expeditions, in his case to Operation Deep Freeze II when he was a winterover at Little America. Paul Siple was an earlier participant who became an important American explorer and encouraged this young man who later went to Princeton. The writing is wooden and generally sanctimonious, betraying the author’s youth. Reading is minimal, mostly confined to the Bible (p. 81), though he does find a copy of Murphy’s Oceanic Birds of South America to help his pursuit of ornithology, and he did participate in Little America’s “University of the Antarctic.” At those sessions he studied Morse code and did manage to send off a sample message. He ends with a rather fundamentalist homily based on Matt 28:20: “lo, I am with you always, even unto the end of the world.” Chappell does not appear to have published anything else.
David H. Stam's Anthologies of the Reading Experience