Adventures in Human Being

A sober and beautiful book about the landscape of the human body: thought-provoking and eloquent. Hilary Mantel Wonderful, subtle, unpretentious ... produces a kind of complicity between the author, the reader, and the subject John Berger Immensely engaging. The Sunday Times In Francis's beautifully written, exquisitely thoughtful, and completely captivating cartography, the body is a superbly-lit museum filled with treasures, and Dr. Francis the perfect guide who deftly weaves together science and story to reveal the wondrous flesh-and-blood underpinnings of our daily lives. It's a spellbinding view. -- Diane Ackerman, author of The Zookeeper's Wifeand The Human Age I read this book transfixed... The style is crisp and fast and the human tales irresistible. I was left with many nuggets. -- Melanie Reid The Times So enthralling and so well written that it should win its own clutch of prizes... immensely engaging and often unexpected. His achievement here is to guide readers through his special landscape with such eloquence and subtlety. -- Nick Rennison Sunday Times Grand, eloquent stuff, occasionally humorous, frequently moving and invariably informative... The end result is a thoroughly entertaining, provocative work. -- Robin McKie The Observer The joy of Mr Francis's work lies in the fact that although he delights in the body's physical reality, he takes care not to reduce human experience to that alone. The Economist A quietly radical, three-dimensional view of issues such as reproduction, birth, death and disability that has the power, at times, to make you stop mid-sentence and carefully reassess some of your most basic assumptions... its greatest strength is its profound yet understated compassion. The Scotsman Praise for Empire Antarctica: Francis' best writing (and it is excellent)... is Robert Macfarlane on ice. This writing achieves the 'quilted quality' of silence, and through it we are brought to a new landscape of words. Literary Review Empire Antarctica is the embodiment of everything I admire in travel writing -- a great journey, intense isolation, wide reading, vivid writing, scientific research, and something in the nature of an old-fashioned ordeal. That Gavin Francis is a medical doctor, with an important role to play in the darkness and cold at the ends of the earth, is a bonus. I loved this book. -- Paul Theroux A beautiful, profound and highly readable account of a remarkable personal adventure. Francis's pacing is deft, his prose vivid, his research worn lightly. Empire Antarctica is surely destined to become a standard, not so much of travel as of staying very still. Daily Telegraph