The Southern Ocean - a vast belt of cold, fertile water that laps at Antarctica's icy shores - offers a cold shoulder to the casual visitor. Historically only those with mechanical might or fiercely strong wills have penetrated its forbidding bounds to explore or exploit. It is little understood and written about even less.

Enter James Gorman, whose trenchant analysis and crystalline prose part the veil that hides the Southern Ocean from our understanding and appreciation. This ocean is a crucible in which world weather is made, as it empties enormous amounts of heat into the atmosphere from the warm water other oceans feed it. It is home to an elegantly simple ecosystem, where penguins predominate and many species of whale have thrived and died.

It is also the stage upon which have played some of the most heroic and unnerving spectacles of human history, from Captain Cook's voyages of discovery to the whaling industry's voyages of destruction.

Gorman casts a brilliant light on the islands that dot the Southern Ocean and the continent it surrounds. He visits McMurdo Station on the Antarctic coast, equal parts military outpost and college campus, where Antarctic survival courses are a favorite extracurricular activity. He even strikes out into the continent's interior - the world's driest as well as coldest terrain - to retrace the journeys of Amundsen, Scott, and other less well known but no less intrepid explorers.

Throughout Ocean Enough and Time, Gorman blends historical anecdote, scientific revelation, limpid elegies on a stark, natural beauty, and personal epiphany into a captivating chronicle, one that merits comparison with Ian Frazier's Great Plains for the eloquence with which it evokes and celebrates a grand place.