SOURCE: “Sculpture of Courage,” in Chicago Tribune, June 9, 1994, p. 5.

In the following review, Schaffer offers positive assessment of The Birthday Boys.

Nothing punishes like the cold. If you doubt this, remember how miserable you felt just a few months ago when winter seemed endless.

Not surprisingly, some modern fiction writers have found that they can map the terrain of the human soul more accurately at horribly low temperatures, when body and mind move in slow motion.

English author Beryl Bainbridge does this skillfully in The Birthday Boys, a fictional account of Robert Falcon Scott's disastrous expedition to the South Pole in 1912.

Scott and each of the four men who will die with him tell part of the story of their doomed project. Despite differences of personality and background, they share the naive bravery of overgrown boys on a great adventure-boyish enough to remember their birthdays even under the...