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Product Description
Product Description
I May Be Some Time is a richly engrossing cultural history of our obsession with ice, Eskimos and polar exploration.
When Captain Scott died in 1912 on his way back from the South Pole, his story became a myth embedded in the national imagination. Despite wars and social change, despite recent debunking, it is still there. Everyone remembers the doomed explorers' last words - 'I'm just going outside, and I may be some time' - and history is what you can remember.
Conventional histories of polar exploration trace the laborious expeditions across the map, dwelling on the proper techniques of ice-navigation and sledge-travel. But we rarely ask what the explorers thought they were doing, or why they did these insane things.
I May Be Some Time is about the poles as they have been perceived, dreamed, even desired. It explores the myth as myth, showing how Scott's death was the culmination to a long-running national enchantment with perilous journeys to the ends of the earth.
'The thrills of desolation, of icy beauty, of challenge, of human courage, of comradeship . . . I May Be Some Time is a truly majestic work of scholarship, thought and literary imagination.' Jan Morris, The Times
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Customer Reviews
It is a valuable addition for anybody with a stock of Roland Huntford biographies, or any of the many boy's own-style books about the Endurance expedition. It places these tales in a psychological landscape. For anyone who wonders 'why?' these guys did what they did, this book attempts to get behind their eyes and show you.
It is beautifully written. The density of Spufford's style demands that you pour over every line, every word. It is not a book to be rushed. It is one of the best-written non-fiction book's I have ever read - for its use of language. There are some stunningly beautiful passages, as well as interesting accounts of Dickens' and George Bernard Shaw's roles in the history of the poles. The use of ice and snow in Moby Dick and Frankenstein has you looking as these works in a totally new way - not as singular works of genius and originality, but as stories using the common theme of the day at a time when everybody wanted a piece of the poles (much as novelists now write about Big Brother and text messages).
Despite this, it probably is a book only for lovers of extreme exploration, as it is quite a marginal subject, even in the face of the recent Shackleton-mania. But for the armchair Scotts/Shackletons/Amundsens out there, reading it will make your year. I cannot recommend it highly enough.
It's fantastically well written, though the worming into the fine detail left me wishing the author would hurry up and get to the point - not a style that appeals to me - though I can see how many would thoroughly enjoy this book.
Spuffords exemplary style mixes detailed research with carefully (almost lovingly) selected... Read more
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