SOURCE: “Antarctic Antics,” in New York Times Book Review, April 17, 1994, p. 15.

In the following review, Krist offers favorable assessment of The Birthday Boys.

“All Englishmen are virtuous,” wrote George Orwell in his novel Burmese Days—“when they are dead.” And certainly death does seem to have a remarkable effect on the moral character, regardless of the corpse's nationality. No sooner is a body cold in the ground than the eulogies begin, obscuring the psychological complexities of the living person beneath a layer of sonorous pieties. This kind of posthumous revisionism is especially pronounced in the case of soldiers, politicians, explorers and others who have fallen in service to God and country in remote latitudes. Whatever these people may have been in life, in death they are transformed.

It is, I feel, partly to debunk such sentimentalized views of the figures of our past that some writers are drawn...