Journeys with the Emperors: Tracking the World’s Most Extreme Penguin

This book seamlessly weaves 2 amazing stories. The first, embedded in the subtitle, is to document the remarkable natural history and Antarctic distribution of the amazing, indeed mind-boggling, Emperor Penguin. The second story is the story of Kooyman himself, now 89 years old, whose career spanned decades of remarkable groundbreaking research experience of tagging, diving with, and studying Emperor Penguins among their various colonies on the pack ice of Antarctica. Kooyman is not lacking in enthusiasm: “Here we were, in the depths of winter, out on the sea ice for hours when the temperature and wind in combination occasionally exposed us to a windchill factor of more than −73°C (−100°F). In spite of these conditions, it was the most comfortable field work I have ever done” (p. 112). The book is written in the first person (of Kooyman) although it is co-authored by Jim Mastro, also an experienced Antarctic researcher,...