In a world crowded by authoritarianism and tribalism, exploitative globalization and financial meltdown, there is little room for the celebration of human achievement. After all, of what relevance to the war-torn and the oppressed, the distracted and the bored, are the accomplishments of explorers who have long-since been pulled under by the tide of history? Of what use to the beleaguered are the teachings of the nearly forgotten?
Great achievement may mean little to those among us just trying to survive; it may mean even less to those preoccupied by the distractions of a Facebook world, but they should mean something. For without great achievement, without the men and women of the past who bent their wills to the singleminded dream of something better, we would still be running with the monkeys, sleeping under trees for cover and hunting our food which sticks. Civilization itself is the gestalt of generations of human achievement. And if we allow that to be neglected, to lapse into the past unremarked, then civilization will rot and all that we have made will stagnate.
This is why we read books about men like Roald Amundsen, adventurers who possess indomitable wills and resilient spirits, men who shame our petty fears by looking into the unknown and seeing only an ignorance waiting to be conquered. And so, it is a great pity that, here, Ms. Cox does her worthy subject such a grave disservice.
South With The Sun is ostensibly the author's reconstruction of the life of Roald Amundsen, the first human being to not only reach the South Pole, but to reach both poles in separate expeditions. Born in modern-day Norway in 1879, he abandoned the settled life of a doctor and, at the age of 21, fixed himself upon a life of naval adventure. At great cost in physical suffering, and for very little financial gain, he successfully navigated the Northwest Passage (1903-1906), reached the South Pole (1911), and flew over the North Pole (1925). All of these feats, firsts in human history, may have had to share the limelight with yet more achievements by Amundsen had his life not come to a tragic end in 1928 when, taking part in a rescue mission, his plane crashed in the Barents Sea. A keen planner, Amundsen was renowned for a willingness to learn from the native peoples he encountered on his journeys, lessons which bestowed upon him a substantial competitive advantage over his fellow and less successful explorers.
While Ms. Cox, here, pays tribute to Mr. Amundsen's unique achievements, in reserving more than half of South With The Sun's 320 pages for herself, she dooms her tribute to the great Norwegian explorer. An American swimmer, Ms. Cox sparingly describes Amundsen's background and his achievements while lavishing self-reverential attention upon her own efforts to swim Earth's oceans under the most challenging of conditions. And make no mistake, From Greenland to the Arctic, from the English channel to the Ohio River, Ms. Cox has faced some formidable challenges and conquered many of them. But the extent to which she eagerly fetes herself destroys the reader's ability to hail her accomplishments and put them next to Amundsen's which, in assembling this chronicle as she has, is clearly her goal here.
South With The Sun is a travesty of adventure non-fiction. Had Ms. Cox lengthened her chronicle and done Roald Amundsen's life justice, her self-aggrandizement could have been easily forgiven. After all, in this, she would at least be providing the reader with a book that appropriately honored its subject. Instead, in what swiftly becomes a trumpet for Ms. Cox's own life, South With The Sun is rife with self-importance, name-dropped celebrities, and simplistic prose. One of the most complete disappointments of the year thus far. Roald Amundsen deserves so much more than this, non-fiction less informative than Mr. Amundsen's Wikipedia entry. (1/5 Stars)
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