The Quickening

Creation and Community at the Ends of the Earth

By: Elizabeth Rush

Narrated by: Helen Laser

Length: 10 hrs and 37 mins

Publisher's summary

An astonishing, vital book about Antarctica, climate change, and motherhood from the author of Rising, finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in General Nonfiction.

In 2019, fifty-seven scientists and crew set out onboard the Nathaniel B. Palmer. Their destination: Thwaites Glacier. Their goal: to learn as much as possible about this mysterious place, never before visited by humans, and believed to be both rapidly deteriorating and capable of making a catastrophic impact on global sea-level rise.

In The Quickening, Elizabeth Rush documents their voyage, offering the sublime—seeing an iceberg for the first time; the staggering waves of the Drake Passage; the torqued, unfamiliar contours of Thwaites—alongside the workaday moments of this groundbreaking expedition. A ping-pong tournament at sea. Long hours in the lab. All the effort that goes into caring for and protecting human life in a place that is inhospitable to it. Along the way, she takes readers on a personal journey around a more intimate question: What does it mean to bring a child into the world at this time of radical change?

What emerges is a new kind of Antarctica story, one preoccupied not with flag planting but with the collective and challenging work of imagining a better future. With understanding the language of a continent where humans have only been present for two centuries. With the contributions and concerns of women, who were largely excluded from voyages until the last few decades, and of crew members of color, whose labor has often gone unrecognized. The Quickening teems with their voices—with the colorful stories and personalities of Rush’s shipmates—in a thrilling chorus.

Urgent and brave, absorbing and vulnerable, The Quickening is another essential book from Elizabeth Rush.

©2023 Elizabeth Rush (P)2023 Brilliance Publishing, Inc., all rights reserved.

Critic reviews

“Helen Laser narrates with a thoughtful style, a smart cadence, and an empathetic tone.… Laser emulates the author's probing journalistic style when she interviews her shipmates on their experiences and captures Rush's personal struggle as she contemplates bringing a child into our environmentally compromised world. Laser vividly delivers Rush's thoughts and experiences, including an account of giving birth the year after she returned.”—AudioFile Magazine

“Award-winning narrator Helen Laser offers a smooth, rich performance, ably communicating scientific data while bringing out the human side of this impressive venture. Laser conveys the lyricism of Rush's writing, which verges on poetic, even when describing the small details of taking samples and analyzing measurements. An elegantly narrated, fully fleshed account of a singular trip to an imperiled place. Listeners and readers of Margaret Lowman's The Arbornaut or Naira de Gracia's The Last Cold Place will love this.”—Library Journal

“The fascinating inside story of climate science at the edge of Antarctica [. . .] In this follow-up to Rising: Dispatches from the New American Shore, Rush shows us how data collection happens, capturing the intriguing details of climate science in the field [. . .] The scientists are not the only heroes of Rush’s book, which emphasizes above all the collaborative and interdependent nature of such voyages, where so much depends on the staff and crew. In addition to her own poetic voice, the author incorporates the voices of everyone on the ship, highlighting women and racial and ethnic minorities, who have been overlooked in the canon of Antarctic literature.”—Kirkus Reviews

Something I’ve always wanted to do

As a female scientist I’ve always wanted to go to Antarctica. I really enjoyed the thorough interviews and the humanity that brought to the lives of the scientists who work tirelessly and sacrifice their time, our most precious gift, to bring truth to those who wonder. I hope we never see the end of Thwaites but I am grateful it’s being recorded. I also could relate to the internal monologue of being a scientist and contemplating having a child. Representation matters!

Too much talk of a baby

I really wanted to hear what it was like traveling to and visiting Antarctica. I just couldn’t get past the constant and never ending. Talk about the authors interest and whether to have a baby or not.

Great story but hard to follow

The Quickening is a unique story and a vital one for our generation.
I find the audiobook difficult to follow because of the style of character dialogue the author uses, which consists of long monologues initiated only by the announcing of the character’s name i.e “Jake: [Jake’s monologue] Anna: [Anna’s monologue] with little to no break or interruption from the narrator. It’s often hard to keep track of which character is speaking. It’s sometimes unclear whether the character dialogue has ended/when the text shifts back to the narrator’s persecutive. Throw in a decent helping of scientific language and I believe this would be a book best digested in print.

Terrible narration

The narrator has an incredibly affected way of speaking, intoning every single sentence as if she were making some utterly grave and serious pronouncement. She often ends sentences with an unnatural middle intonation that leaves it hanging. It was so bizarre and unpleasant that it made me dread listening to the book. Eventually I tried pausing the recording and repeating sentences like a normal person, and I realized that it was not the book but the narration that was driving me crazy. Strongly recommend getting a hard copy of this one if you're interested in reading it.

Do not expect to learn much about glaciers

I bought this book under the mistaken assumption that I would learn something about the data the scientific expedition was after. Chapter one tells you the expedition's purpose is to investigate Thwaites, a large Antarctic glacier whose accelerated melting is not well understood and who could be responsible for a dramatic rise in sea level worldwide. By the end of the book you don't know much more than that.
The book's ambition is not without merit: to present the ruminations of a scientist who wants to be a mother but is concerned about bringing children into an ecologically compromised world. In practice, I found most of her arguments to be self-indulgent and unconvincing (and I'm not antikid). A lot of the imagery falls flat or is incongruous: "the sky turned the color of reptile stew" (??) and her attempts to draw parallels between human birth and glacial calving become tedious after a while.
One thing the book does well is present the inner workings of a scientific expedition in Antarctica. I wish there was more of it, and some data to buttress the book. I suppose it was written soon after her return so she had no data to contribute.

If you are not interested in someone's detailed pregnancy journey and their qualms at birthing new life in a changing climate, this is not the book for you.