Margaret Winslow – författare

a pioneering female geologist explores the topography of South America and the shifting landscape of women in the sciencesA satisfying journey through 1970s sexual politics and the lands of the southernmost part of the Earth. Kirkus ReviewsSomewhere near the bottom edge of the earth, a young woman attempts to balance on a slippery rock ledge. With her back pressed against an overhanging cliff face, her arms too weak to climb, and the tide rising at an alarming rate, there is nowhere to go. So how did she come to be alone on a sinking knife edge in Tierra del Fuego, halfway between the Beagle Channel and Cape Horn, seven thousand miles from New York?In her fascinating travel memoir, Margaret Winslow offers a compelling glimpse into her misadventures as an inexperienced geologist as she begins pioneering field research in southern South America. Beginning in the mid-1970s, Winslow details her unforgettable experiences that include clinging to a ledge alone as the tide rises over her boot tops, facing near-death experiences with killer whales, and encountering an antediluvian creature with a cavernous mouth and yellow teethall while tracing her evolution from an ill-prepared beginner to a competent leader.Over My Head captures one womans historic journeys into uncharted fjords and trackless forests as she attempts to navigate through the almost exclusively male world of field geology and discovers she must learn to rely on her own inner compass in order to survive.

It was December 1974 when Margaret Winslow arrived in Punta Arenas, the only city on the Strait of Magellan, prepared to begin her doctoral thesis project. With both excitement and dread, she looked forward to working on familiar rocks in a dynamic region and exploring Tierra del Fuego and Patagonia. But first, she had to cross the trackless southern Andes on foot.

In the sequel to her award-winning travel-adventure memoir, Over My Head, Dr. Winslow recounts her ongoing field experiences from the 1970s through the 1990s during intense political paroxysms in Chile and Argentina. Her unforgettable adventures include being arrested and interrogated by the Argentine Navy, a close brush with death on a flight over the Strait of Magellan, and the rescue of an injured child at an isolated farm. Her fascinating narrative includes the frightening details of an assault by a fisherman that hurled the previously intrepid traveler into a state of intense agoraphobia that she had to overcome if she was to survive, return to the wilderness, and work mostly alone.

The Cusp of Dreadfulness continues a geologists recounting of her struggles through the wilderness of southern South America during a time of brutal transformation.