A Polar Affair: Antarctica’s Forgotten Hero and the Secret Love Lives of Penguins

George Murray Levick was a physician on Robert Falcon Scott’s tragic Antarctic expedition of 1910. Marooned in the Antarctic, both on Cape Ader and in a snow cave on Inexpressible Island, Levick passed the time by becoming the first man to study penguins up close. His findings were so shocking to Victorian morals that they were quickly suppressed and then seemingly lost to history.

A century later, Davis, one of today’s preeminent penguin biologists, rediscovers Levick and his findings during the course of his own scientific adventures in Antarctica. Levick’s long-suppressed manuscript unearths not only an incredible survival story, but also findings that will change our understanding of an entire species.

Davis reveals the last untold tale from the Heroic Age of Antarctic Exploration. It is perhaps the greatest of all of those stories — but why was it hidden to begin with? The ever-fascinating and charming penguin holds the key.

Moving deftly between both Levick’s and Davis’s explorations, observations, and comparisons in biology over the course of a century, A Polar Affair uncovers cutting-edge findings about ornithology, using the sex lives of penguins as the jumping-off point for major new insights into the underpinnings of evolutionary biology itself.