In just over two hundred years, Antarctica has gone from being a distantly seen, near-fictional place to becoming a tourism destination of choice. In her new book “Brand Antarctica; How Global Consumer Culture Shapes Our Perceptions of the Ice Continent,” Dr. Hanne Elliot Fønss Nielsen explores how this transformation occurred through the popular media and what the implications of such a media-generated understanding of it are.
While visiting the Festival of the Cranes at the Bosque del Apache National Wildlife Refuge, I naturally peeked in to the visitors center and the little shop operated by the Friends of the Bosque located there. Experience has taught me that very often these little refuge shops can be excellent locations to discover some very interesting books addressing the natural history of the local area – and indeed, this was the case here. While there were literally dozens of books seen on the shelves that were worthy of note, those that follow particularly caught my attention.