Books: Souls on Ice
By James Zug

A First Rate Tragedy: Robert Falcon Scott and the Race to the South Pole, by Diana Preston (Houghton Mifflin, $25). On a bitterly cold polar summer day in January 1912, British naval officer Robert Falcon Scott reached the South Pole, only to discover that Norwegian rival Roald Amundsen had beat him there by 33 days. Ten weeks later, an exhausted and starving Scott lay down in his tent and waited to die. These are just two moments of terrible self-reckoning that London journalist Diana Preston relates in meticulous detail in her psychological study of Scott and his final expedition. In the early chapters, Preston creates a finely drawn portrait of the young and ambitious "Con," a serious and lonely naval officer "with a horror of blood and a love of solitude" who constantly struggled under the strain of leadership. In her narrative, Preston grapples incisively with Scott's questionable judgment — his decision to use ponies instead of dogs, for example, to haul his half-ton sledges — while also factoring in the relentless bad luck that led to his ruin. Yet it was the combination of his valor and his brave failure (news of his death reached England only 10 months after the world had mourned the loss of the Titanic) that bequeathed us his legend, along with "the irony that so many things which had eluded Scott in life were posthumously heaped upon his head."
Available at Amazon.com

The Poisonwood Bible, Barbara Kingsolver (HarperCollins, $26). Kingsolver fans will be surprised by the setting for her eighth book, a wonderfully weighty new novel whose plot unfolds not in the desert Southwest but in the Belgian Congo, beginning in 1959. Drawing from her childhood experience as the daughter of an American doctor whose family accompanied him on a medical mission to Central Africa in the early '60s, Kingsolver tells the story of Nathan and Orleanna Price and their four daughters, an American missionary family that takes up residence in a small Congolese village in the months leading up to the country's independence. But the novel represents more than just a change of scenery: Kingsolver's tone has shifted, too, away from the chatty and whimsical voice of Taylor Greer in The Bean Trees toward the solemn and at times fiercely political. Moreover, in Nathan Price, a fanatical and oblivious Baptist minister whose soul is curled tight "like a piece of hard shoe leather," she has created a memorable villain. Narrated by Price's wife and daughters, The Poisonwood Bible details the family's year and a half on the mission, under the looming shadow of the minister's pride and the nation's violent and irreversible upheaval. Dark events abound: Price becomes unhinged when the villagers of Kilanga eventually vote to reject Jesus; Ruth May, the youngest daughter, breaks an arm, contracts malaria, and then dies from the bite of a green mamba snake on the same day that Patrice Lumumba, Congo's first prime minister, is assassinated. Still, Kingsolver's characters exhibit their trademark wisdom and resilience, making this a deeply satisfying yet sobering meditation on the collision of American and African realities. "You can't just sashay into the jungle aiming to change it all over to the Christian style," declares eldest daughter Rachel, "without expecting the jungle to change you right back."
Available at Amazon.com

Photographs by Clay Ellis