Everything about the emperor penguin is extraordinary. No less remarkable is the story of Luc Jacquet's film, the surprise hit and already the most successful nature film in American motion picture history.<BR>This companion volume chronicles both the emperor penguins' life cycle, an eternal struggle unchanged for millennia, and the 13 months that Jacquet and his crew shared with these ungainly yet elegant birds in the loneliest place on the planet, an unforgiving environment blasted by winds that exceed 150 miles per hour and drive temperatures to 70 degrees below zero. This is an epic tale of endurance captured in scores of stunning full-color photographs revealing not just Nature at her most merciless but also the triumph of life against all odds.