Dizzying Friends and Days ; Novelist Robert Stone Revisits the Turbulent Sixties

Summary

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Robert Stone's engaging memoir begins in 1958 when he finds himself at the helm of a naval transport ship on an Antarctic expedition, tracking electrical activity on the surface of the sun.

Suddenly he sights an unidentified mass, changing its shape and direction and impressing the helmsman as something monstrous, "a living thing, huge and strong, unrecognizable." A scientist aboard the ship has a look and identifies the mass as an enormous colony of migrating Adelie penguins that Mr. Stone describes thus:

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Dizzying Friends and Days ; Novelist Robert Stone Revisits the Turbulent Sixties

"Their Chaplin-like gait and myopic, clueless stares deprive them of the dignity of which all creatures in their natural state should be entitled. Even the desperate defense of their nests and eggs has an absurd quality." They are "Donald Duck-like" creatures "cackling . . . foul obscenities and churning their flippers faster than the eye can see, l...

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