Antarctica-the edge of the world, the last continent, the Ice. It''s a place many people dream of visiting but few actually do it. From how to get there to how to behave, Roff Smith''s stories of life in freezing cold isolation are stranger than fiction and peopled with characters who have made Antarctica home.Smith has visited Antarctica three times. He''s sailed through sea ice on a yacht, traveled with helicopter pilots, measured the true height of Mt. Erebus, and crawled through an eerie crashed plane long-buried under the ground. Distilling facts where necessary, he offers far more than a history, geography, or geology lesson.The allure of the Ice is surely that of freedom, yet the pristine beauty of the blue-white landscape is sharply at odds with the constraints of the bureaucracy of the research bases there-where there''s a form to fill in and a procedure for almost everything, including the most ordinary of bodily functions. This is an intimate view of daily life as seen by a born traveler.