Richard Byrd was an adventurer and explorer. He always was the second best, and he was always trying to show how brave and courageous he was. That's what brought him to this situation: To spend all the long and dark austral winter alone in a small hut very close to the south pole. At the beginning, all was nice and good, but at the end of may, he started to feel the effects of the gas poisoning that he had been suffering due to a faulty burner.
Even when I didn't have a lot of speciations on this, I must say that I have really enjoyed it. There are some passages where he described the beauty of the ice, the southern lights and all this wild environment that I really enjoyed. The struggles to survive and to hide his illness to his partners are really interesting part of the book. The book is well written and very enjoyable. I suppose this experience was an humility cure for him and the book lacks the grandiloquence of other travel books written by men so very pleased to know themselves.