Cathy de Moll

For many years, Cathy de Moll provided the back-office functions for large international projects and special events - fundraising, publicity, politics, logistics, etc.

Her new book, Think South: How We Got Six Men and Forty Dogs Across Antarctica, is an intimate account of the heroic efforts and unique characters who pulled off the first-ever unmechanized crossing of Antarctica organized to bring world attention to the continent and its unique international treaty.

The 1990 International Trans-Antarctica Expedition itself (led by explorers Will Steger and Jean-Louis Etienne) was an epic seven-month, 3,741-mile expedition through territory never before crossed by humans. The behind-the-scenes organization of that expedition - for which de Moll served as executive director - was an equally grueling three-year project involving a unique partnership with the Soviet Union, broken airplanes, financial, political and cultural challenges. Rarely do such adventure stories include the insiders' back story, with all the fascinating miracles and mishaps that inevitably happen along the way.

"I never set foot on the continent of Antarctica," de Moll says in her introduction. "My journey was my own and closer to home... This book is a layered series of portraits of people I still consider, after twenty-five years, to be my second family. Together, their stories reveal both the spirit and the chronological events of the expedition on and off the ice. Like the complex puzzle Trans-Antarctica was, the pieces come together bit by bit to reveal the whole."