The Ferocious Summer

Palmer’s Penguins and the Warming of Antarctica

Meredith Hooper

ISBN 1846680085

ISBN 13 9781846680083

August 2007

Price £20.00

Hardback, 320 pp.

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Subject: Natural History

Other formats available: Paperback

The Antarctic Peninsula is for all of us an early warning system. This brilliant book tells the story of Antarctic warming and of how scientists are piecing together the jigsaw of causes and impacts, here in particular through a study of the changing lives and habits of a group of Adélie penguins.

To write this book Meredith Hooper worked with key scientists in bases, on ice breakers and in research vessels. Her story is very precisely located in time and space, focusing on the work and ideas of individual scientists and on the local animals. In it she memorably brings an outsider’s non-specialist awareness to the crucial understanding of what is happening, now, to the planet we share.

‘Hooper has a superb eye for detail and... a highly entertaining style. She points out early that she is not a scientist describing herself as an ’outsider’ to the way scientists think and work. And yet this is one of the most important popular science books to be written in years.’
— Dick Ahlstrom, Irish Times

‘A vivid snapshot of the extraordinary challenges involved in understanding what is happening to the penguins and why one particular type of this much-loved bird is in sharp decline.’
— David Shukman, Daily Mail