Press
"...this isn't a book about Antarctic 'nature.'...one of the best books of the year."
—The Stranger (Seattle)
"Give them enough videos and video games, pop music and posters, and your average Americans can make any end of the Earth look like a suburb of Cleveland."
—The Georgia Straight (Vancouver)
"If you want the antithesis of the hit movie 'March of the Penguins,' then 'Big Dead Place' is it."
—Seattle Times
"If Joseph Heller wrote 'Catch-22' today, he might set it at Mr. Johnson's McMurdo."
—New York Times
"[Big Dead Place] ignores the easy targets in favour of putting forth a journalistic work of depth and craft." —Jim Munroe, interview at nomediakings.org
"...often deranged, funny, and always shrouded in numb-nut company bureaucracy." —Penthouse
A short interview in the Boston Globe.
"Far from the pure white landscape of our collective dreams, Nicholas
Johnson's Antarctica stands out as the fullblown, toxic spawn of America's culture of corpo-dementia and shit-the-bed planetary greed....Big Dead Place is some kind of weird masterpiece—Survivor on Ice as imagined by B. Traven. A fascinating, insane, soul-chilling and hysterical portrait of what may yet prove to be the future —and future WalMart-adjacent tomb— of Western Civilization."
—Jerry Stahl, author of Permanent Midnight
"Big Dead Place is the latest in a long line of accounts by polar
'expeditioners', extending backwards to Frederick Cook of the Belgica
Expedition, of the hardships of living and working in the highest,
driest, coldest, and windiest continent on earth. Johnson's tales of
life at McMurdo Station, Antarctica, are often humorous, occasionally
tragic, but always on target. They offer ample evidence that the
greatest hardship associated with the Antarctic today is not the cold
or any of the other elements of the physical environment, but a social
environment created by the mismatch between a group of free-spirited
individuals seeking adventure and a bureaucratic system whose primary
goal seems to be exerting control in a place where control is an all
but impossible task."
—Lawrence A. Palinkas, polar psychologist
"Even in Antarctica, hash still needs to be slung, dishes need to be washed,
and the support workers at the three high-tech science bases operated for
the US Government by the Raytheon Company are not often happy bunnies. They
are mostly neurotic misfits. A SWAT team of corporate psychologists is sent
in every year to assess personnel for symptoms of lunacy before the long,
cold Antarctic night closes in. Johnson's savagely funny story of life
Inside the Strange and Menacing World of Antarctica is a grunt's-eye view
of fear and loathing, arrogance and insanity in a dysfunctional, dystopian
closed community. It's like M*A*S*H on ice, a bleak, black comedy."
—The Times of London
"Everyday life in modern Antarctica is not the struggle against the forces of nature that is often portrayed in the stories of the early explorers. Instead, in Johnson's tome, it is filled with the mundane tasks required to keep a community functioning (cooking, cleaning, construction) and to support the U.S. presence on the continent. Johnson, who has worked in Antarctica for several years, most recently on garbage detail, here tells the story of life in the small and isolated McMurdo station. From inane Antarctic personalities and events to frustrating bureaucratic games, Johnson offers readers an unsentimental, sometimes even bitter, view of what it means to work here. While some readers will find the language offensive, this humorous and often wittily sarcastic account of a place that people tend to romanticize should be read by anyone seriously considering working in Antarctica; it is also the only book available that shows modern Antarctic life and culture from the worker's perspective. As such, it is recommended to larger travel and social science collections."
—Sheila Kasperek, Library Journal
"Books such as Big Dead Place that give us an unvarnished peek inside the Program are unusual in contemporary Antarctic literature...a rich, witty and important book."
—Jeff Rubin, The Polar Times (.pdf 289k)
"...a skillful blend of Antarctic pop history and anecdotes from his personal experiences at McMurdo....He relates his own experiences with a dark and brutal humor that can alternately set the reader on edge, boil his blood, and bust his gut."
— Adam Boyd Gilman, The Cassandra Files
"If you have never worked at Antarctica, you have no comprehension of what takes place if you're not a member of the scientific or managing group. This void has now been closed by Mr. Johnson's book..."
—Polarforschung (German polar research journal)
"When itinerant American Nick Johnson first headed south to work at the
United States base at McMurdo, near Scott Base, he knew so little about
Antarctica that he says he 'would not have been surprised to find myself
shivering in a tent full of scientists or pulling a sled in a blizzard'.
Instead he found himself in the kitchen, scraping ridges of turkey loaf from
baking pans while listening to Bob Seger. This bizarre conflict between
expectation of a pristine icy environment devoted to science and the reality
of a petty bureaucratic dystopia operated by an offshoot of a huge military
arms manufacturer forms the basis of Big Dead Place. Many Antarctophiles
will already be familiar with Johnson's work through bigdeadplace.com, the
website he used as his work-in-progress during the five summers and two
winter-overs he spent on the Ice. Now the endlessly entertaining, finely
observed, and engagingly written website has become this thorougly enjoyable
book."
—John Henzell, The Press (Christchurch, New Zealand)