Description
Book SynopsisTrade Review"This book is a valuable resource. The topics have been thoroughly researched, and the documentation in notes at the end of the book is meticulous. Impressively, even with the depth of its detail, the book is a pleasure to read. Strongly recommended."--John West, University of California, San Diego "I love this book. With its focus on biomedical research in extreme environments, Higher and Colder shows how twentieth-century expeditions--to the Arctic, the Antarctic, and the Himalayas--are stranger than we thought. This story of exploration plays out on ice caps and mountaintops, but also in places not often sketched on the expeditionary map: inside barometric chambers, scientific outposts, and medical laboratories. Heggie examines the tangible and visceral aspects of expeditionary work--blood, food, clothing, equipment--in order to challenge our basic assumptions about the history of expeditionary science: that we know what it is and how it gets done."--Michael Robinson, University of Hartford "Vanessa Heggie brings to vivid life the history of the sciences of human survival at its limits. Higher and Colder offers a bold and persuasive interpretation of exploration as a scientific practice in the twentieth century, when Mount Everest and the polar regions became natural laboratories for physiological experiments, racial ideologies, gender hierarchies, indigenous technologies, and everyday practices of exploration. Elegantly written, it provides a welcome historical perspective on the biomedical research that has saved the lives of thousands of hikers and mountaineers."--Peter Hansen, Worcester Polytechnic Institute
