I've just posted a review of Gretchen Legler's book On the Ice: An Intimate Portrait of Life at McMurdo Station, Antarctica, on Amazon and on the Story Circle book review site. It's a wonderful example of writing about people-in-place. Antarctica is a unique place, because of all the continents, it is the one that humans have not yet succeeded in fully colonizing. It is almost a peopleless place. Almost. That's what this book is about.
Reading note. It had . . . been good to be out alone, walking in Antarctica, feeling that magical, paradoxical diminishment of self and enlargement of spirit that such a landscape brings--that feeling that one is in the presence of something that has been in existence long before you and will continue long after you, into all time; some spirit that is larger and older than the human mind, and that, in its power, comforts rather than terrifies.--Gretchen Legler, On the Ice