This is a complex and ambitious book, and the result is thoroughly engrossing. It is an introduction to lake science, an adventure tale, and an account of how a scientist plans and executes his work, but these are just at the surface. It is also a personal exploration of the author's own memories and motives. Ultimately, it is a book about what moves mankind to keep learning and exploring, presented using the author as his own example.

Wondering about the powerful emotional draw that Antarctica exerts on him, the author is reminded of his boyhood, when Great Lakes winter storms would transform his town's landscape with a featureless cover of snow, allowing him to explore what became, in his imagination, an unexplored land. He describes the beauty that can be found, if one will allow himself, in the terrifying nothingness of the universe, whether it be seen in the vast coldness of space or the inhuman bleakness of an ice-covered continent. Some of his colleagues found Antactica intolerable, probably for the same reasons. He writes...

"The ice seemed a reminder of the universe at large, of the universe as accident, as matter blown and strewn and expanding, 'heartless' as Melville had described it, all moon-filled and dry, hung with poisoned worlds, incinerating stars, vacuums of frozen light. Loneliness, the warm sun as memory, as myth, the blankness of white landscape, in which we see no trace of ourselves, no artifact of our genius and cunning...". Reading this, I was taken back to my own boyhood to find my love of exploration awakened as I stood studying the cold and vastly distant stars from by back yard, and felt the fearful thrill of being sucked upward into the eternal void...