2012 marks the centennial of the famous race to the South Pole between Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen and Britain's Robert Falcon Scott. Not only did Amundsen triumph-reaching the Pole just two weeks before Scott-but tragically, Scott and the men with him never made it home. The British team, meanwhile, had broader scientific objectives for the trip. Hooper focuses on six members of Scott's team who were left on the eastern glacier with the expectation of being picked up the next year. After spending a year on the ice, they were ready to leave as planned, but the ship that was to pick them up never arrived. Left with few supplies, they were forced to make a winter trek on foot to reach Scott's back-up team. Hooper (The Ferocious Summer) explores how the stressful conditions transformed the relationships of the six men, dissolving class barriers between the three ordinary seamen and the three gentleman adventurers. This gripping scientific adventure story also includes fascinating details about glacial ecology. (Oct.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

As the 100th anniversary of Scott's tragic race to the South Pole approaches, Hooper turns her eye to the lesser-known work of the six scientist-explorers who were tasked with working alone for a year at distant Evans Coves while Scott sought his shot at history. A blend of officers and enlisted men, with varying degrees of cold-weather-survival experience and struggling under the constraints the more important Pole party placed upon both their supplies and support, these men were ill equipped, overwhelmed, and forced more than once to consider if anything they accomplished would ever be deemed worthwhile, let alone noteworthy. Hooper brings these men to life with aplomb, relying on diaries, journals, and letters to show their divergent viewpoints, frustrations, and fears. For once, Scott and the men who died with him are not the focus, as the science he had early championed was diligently pursued by those now criminally forgotten. Through Hooper's careful prose, Campbell, Levick, Priestley, Abbott, Browning, and Dickason live on again; Scott's Other Heroes, indeed.--Mondor, Colleen Copyright 2010 Booklist