Ice Bound: A Doctor's Incredible Battle for Survival at the South Pole / Ghosts in the Classroom: Stories of College Adjunct Faculty and the Price We All Pay

Academe, Jul/Aug 2002 by Treichler, Paula A, Nelson, Cary

Ice Bound: A Doctor's Incredible Battle for Survival at the South Pole

Jerri Nielsen with Maryanne Vollers. New York: Talk Miramax/Hyperion, 2001

Ghosts in the Classroom: Stories of College Adjunct Faculty and the Price We All Pay Michael Dubson, ed. Boston: Camel's Back Books, 2001

Better than air-conditioning to offset summer's heat is Ice Bound by Jerri Nielsen. Accurately subtitled A Doctor's Incredible Battle for Survival at the South Pole, Nielsen's story got widespread media coverage when she-while serving as a research station's only physician during the winter of 1999diagnosed and treated her own breast cancer by way of satellite and e-mail communication with experts back in the continental United States. Living in the totally isolated research community of the "Dome," with outside temperatures of a hundred degrees below zero and twenty-four-hour-aday darkness, Nielsen knew that for eight months no one could get in or out. Indeed, it was in part the risk inherent in this stark and absolute fact that led her to become the "American ice doctor." Ultimately, two extraordinary rescue fighters saved her life: first, an unprecedented air drop delivered critical supplies and medicines, then, as the cancer aggressively returned, a massively complex airlift carried her to New Zealand during a brief break in the winter storm season.

While it was the breast cancer and rescue drama that caught the media's attention and ultimately motivated Nielsen to write her book, her story is not really a tale of "triumph over disease." Rather, it is an adventure story-- for all genders-of physical and psychological transformation, of becoming "of the ice," and of learning to endure mundane experience under radically weird climatic conditions. There is no textbook for practicing medicine at the South Pole, for example, where the whole community routinely suffers from hypothermia and chronic oxygen starvation. "Common medical supplies such as adhesive bandages were useless here," Nielsen writes, so doctors learned to improvise. "Duct tape sometimes worked, electrical tape was great, because it stretched." When skin on the hands dried and cracked "into deep, hard fissures that refused to heal," superglue was the only thing that closed them and kept them closed. In the end, it was the joy of adventure that she loved, the unique community, the beauty and "staggering emptiness" of Antarctica: "its waves of ice in a hundred shades of blue and white, its black winter sky, its ecstatic wheel of stars."

Of course, if global warming has not yet reached your neighborhood-and if you want to turn the academic temperature up this summer-we have another book to recommend: Michael Dubson's edited collection, Ghosts in the Classroom: Stories of College Adjunct Faculty and the Price We All Pay. It is a gathering of twenty-five essays by adjunct faculty and constitutes a ruthlessly honest collective cultural manifesto and personal confession. The essays are a mix of reportage, personal narrative, institutional interrogation, and reflection on the present and future of higher education. They mix cold analysis with both wit and rage, as some of the titles indicate: "Adjuncts Are Not People," "We Only Come Out at Night," "The Censorship of Part-Timers," "The Witch and the Wimp," "A Lover's Complaint," "Farewell to Teaching." This is the first book devoted fully to adjuncts telling their own stories in their own words. It makes for compelling reading, and it addresses the single most serious problem in higher education. Its audience is everyone concerned about American higher education. We cannot think of a more important book for all of us to read.

Paula Treichler is director of the Institute of Communications Research at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Cary Nelson, a member of Academe's editorial advisory board, teaches at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.