Polar Regions Books

Endurance: Shackleton's Incredible Voyage

Alfred Lansing

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 392 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Just Incredible Account ,Absolutely Incredible 5 out of 5 stars.
1 of 1 people found this review helpful.

This account of Shackelton's expedition to Antarctic is a read like no other. I could not put this book down,nor could I believe the constitution each person on the crew had to continue forth under such insurmountable odds. The author, Lansing has provided a compelling book. His research of events are smoothly seamed together captivating the reader. Even if ones interest usually doesn't lean toward the topic of explorer, I promise you this book will consume you. Its message is especially good for any of us who may be feeling "overwhelmed" by what our lives are tossing our way... you will be giving thanks at the comforts you have by comparison to this expeditions minimal articles to provide their continued existence. As another reviewer mentioned, buy the hard or soft-cover not paperback version as these include all of Hurley's photographs which are essential to this book-seeing is believing and you won't believe what this photographer captured. Enjoy, you will share the events of this book over and over with many.

Editorial Review:

The astonishing saga of polar explorer Ernest Shackleton's survival for over a year on the ice-bound Antarctic seas, as "Time" magazine put it, "defined heroism". Alfred Lansing's scrupulously researched and brilliantly narrated book--with over 200,000 copies sold--has long been acknowledged as the definitive account of the "Endurance's" fateful trip. of photos and maps. Nationwide traveling museum exhibition.

The Endurance: Shackleton's Legendary Antarctic Expedition

Caroline Alexander

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 161 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

Melding superb research and the extraordinary expedition photography of Frank Hurley, The Endurance by Caroline Alexander is a stunning work of history, adventure, and art which chronicles "one of the greatest epics of survival in the annals of exploration." Setting sail as World War I broke out in Europe, the Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition, led by renowned polar explorer Sir Ernest Shackleton, hoped to become the first to cross the Antarctic continent. But their ship, Endurance, was trapped in the drifting pack ice, eventually to splinter, leaving the expedition stranded on floes--a situation that seemed "not merely desperate but impossible."

Most skillfully Alexander constructs the expedition's character through its personalities--the cast of veteran explorers, scientists, and crew--with aid from many previously unavailable journals and documents. We learn, for instance, that carpenter and shipwright Henry McNish, or "Chippy," was "neither sweet-tempered nor tolerant," and that Mrs. Chippy, his cat, was "full of character." Such firsthand descriptions, paired with 170 of Frank Hurley's intimate photographs, which are comprehensively assembled here for the first time, penetrate the hulls of the Endurance and these tough men. The account successfully reveals the seldom-seen domestic world of expedition life--the singsongs, feasts, lectures, camaraderie--so that when the hardships set in, we know these people beyond the stereotypical guise of mere explorers and long for their safety.

Alexander reveals Shackleton as an inspiring optimist, "a leader who put his men first." Throughout the grueling ordeal, Shackleton and his men show what endurance and greatness are all about. The Endurance is a most intimate portrait of an expedition and of survival. Readers will possess a newfound respect for these daring souls, know better their unthinkable toil and half-forgotten realm of glory. --Byron Ricks

The Ice Diaries: The True Story of One of Mankind's Greatest Adventures

Captain William R. Anderson

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 5 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

Gripping account of a real and daring adventure. 5 out of 5 stars.
16 of 16 people found this review helpful.

You might not think that an account of a real world event such as the first visit to the North Pole (and transit of the Arctic Ocean) with its outcome well known could be suspenseful and gripping. If so, you have not read "The Ice Diaries: The Untold Story of the USS Nautilus and the Cold War's Most Daring Mission" by William R. Anderson (the commander of Nautilus during that historic voyage) and Don Keith. Although the story has been told before, this time many previously classified aspects are explored in detail and perhaps for the first time the real nature of risks and daring are evident. Anderson and Keith describe the first two attempts to reach the Pole, both defeated by inexperience, faulty equipment, and sheer lack of knowledge of underwater Arctic conditions. But Anderson and the crew of Nautilus persevered and performed brilliantly to achieve not only reaching the Pole, but to cross all the way from the Pacific to the Atlantic in doing so. "The Ice Diaries" is a page-turner of the best sort. And it is pleasing to report that Anderson took great pains to make clear the contributions of everyone involved, although he remained modest about his own role. Fifty years afterwards, it may be difficult to realize what an extraordinary achievement it was, and the impact it had, both upon public opinion and on Cold War strategic thinking. The voyage of Nautilus from the Pacific to the Atlantic via the North Pole can justly stand alongside the Apollo moon missions as one of the greatest adventures of the Twentieth century made possible by evolving technology.

Editorial Review:

Now, for the first time, the captain of the submarine USS Nautilus tells the newly declassified story of his ship's desperate Cold War race beneath the polar ice pack.

The Cold War was in full swing. The Soviet Union had just successfully launched Sputnik, and President Eisenhower badly wanted to redeem the reputation of the US as technologically superior. "Operation Sunshine" was the answer: under top-secret orders, the Captain and crew of one of the first nuclear submarines, the USS Nautilus, crossed under the North Pole and became the first naval vessel to forge all the way under the polar ice pack to emerge near the former Soviet Union. Readers will voyage along with Captain Anderson as he shares newly declassified stories of his sub's encounters with terrible storms, fire in the hold, collisions with ice, broken compasses, and more.

The Worst Journey in the World (Penguin Classics)

Apsley Cherry-Garrard

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 8 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

In this case, Worst Journey is no conceit 5 out of 5 stars.
5 of 5 people found this review helpful.

It's been more than ten years since I read Cherry-Garrard's account of Scott's journey to Antarctica, but I can still feel the lung-searing cold and hear the hellish, monstrous wind coming out of the center of the continent into which the journey was headed. I have never read of anything more terrible than this expedition including Shackleton's truncated Antarctic nightmare and Lewis and Clark's astonishing and dangerous overland haul from St. Louis to the Pacific.

This particular expedition was one terrible misadventure after another almost from the very start when there is a storm at sea right out of the gate as the ship carrying everyone and everything from Tierra del Fuego is swamped and so much food, materiel, and livestock are lost overboard. From there the bad luck never seems to stop. The very fact that these men continued on under circumstances that would have discouraged and then defeated most human beings is almost past credibility. In particular I remember the constant breaking down of the diesel-engined snow cats, the terrible fate of the Asian ponies, the leopard seals, and the long dark impossible trip that Garrard and one other member of the expedition take in the dead of the Antarctic winter to the Emperor Penguin breeding grounds to retrieve a few precious eggs for science. In winter. In the dark. Wearing 1911 woolen clothes, eating preseved 1911 food, and using 1911 (non-)technology. It took 1911 men to do it. I cannot imagine anyone from our time doing this with that equipment. At times I simply had to stop reading and wonder just how much more hardship human beings could stand. I've never felt so physically uncomfortable, so drained and so worried (as a mere reader!) as I was ploughing through this book which was a feat (the writing of it) in itself.

This is a story about a long-vanished era where grit and determination were measured on a different scale from what we see today. An absolute must for any lover of true adventure. It truly was the worst journey in the world against which any subsequent mission of its kind - including extra-terrestrial - must be judged.

Editorial Review:

The Worst Journey in the World recounts Robert Falcon Scott’s ill-fated expedition to the South Pole. Apsley Cherry-Garrard—the youngest member of Scott’s team and one of three men to make and survive the notorious Winter Journey—draws on his firsthand experiences as well as the diaries of his compatriots to create a stirring and detailed account of Scott’s legendary expedition. Cherry himself would be among the search party that discovered the corpses of Scott and his men, who had long since perished from starvation and brutal cold. It is through Cherry’s insightful narrative and keen descriptions that Scott and the other members of the expedition are fully memorialized.

Unknown Waters: A First-Hand Account of the Historic Under-ice Survey of the Siberian Continental Shelf by USS Queenfish (SSN-651)

Alfred S McLaren

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 10 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

This title tells about charting the Siberian continental shelf during the height of the Cold War.This book tells the story of the brave officers and crew of the nuclear submarine USS Queenfish (SSN-651), who made the first survey of the remote and important Arctic Ocean region. The unpredictability of floating sea ice, shallow waters, and possible Soviet discovery, all play a dramatic part in this fascinating 1970 voyage.Covering 3,100 miles over a period of some 20 days at a laborious average speed of 6.5 knots, the attack submarine threaded its way through underwater canyons of ice and rolling seafloor, at one point becoming lodged in an "ice garage." Only cool thinking and skillful maneuvering of the nearly 5,000-ton vessel dislodged it. The second phase of the journey began 240 nautical miles beyond the North Pole with a detailed survey of the Siberian shelf, working back to the Bering Strait through the Laptev, East Siberian, and Chukchi seas.The skipper of the Queenfish had been trained and selected by Admiral Hyman Rickover and, inspired by this polar experience, McLaren became one of the world's foremost Arctic scientists, studying first at Cambridge University, and obtaining his doctorate in polar studies from the University of Colorado at Boulder.

The Last Place on Earth (Modern Library Exploration)

Roland Huntford

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 77 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

On December 14, 1911, the classical age of polar exploration ended when Norway's Roald Amundsen conquered the South Pole. His competitor for the prize, Britain's Robert Scott, arrived one month later--but died on the return with four of his men only 11 miles from their next cache of supplies. But it was Scott, ironically, who became the legend, Britain's heroic failure, "a monument to sheer ambition and bull-headed persistence. His achievement was to perpetuate the romantic myth of the explorer as martyr, and ... to glorify suffering and self-sacrifice as ends in themselves." The world promptly forgot about Amundsen.

Biographer Ronald Huntford's attempt to restore Amundsen to glory, first published in 1979 under the title Scott and Amundsen, has been thawed as part of the Modern Library Exploration series, captained by Jon Krakauer (of Into Thin Air fame). The Last Place on Earth is a complex and fascinating account of the race for this last great terrestrial goal, and it's pointedly geared toward demythologizing Scott. Though this was the age of the amateur explorer, Amundsen was a professional: he left little to chance, apprenticed with Eskimos, and obsessed over every detail. While Scott clung fast to the British rule of "No skis, no dogs," Amundsen understood that both were vital to survival, and they clearly won him the Pole.

Amundsen in Huntford's view is the "last great Viking" and Scott his bungling opposite: "stupid ... recklessly incompetent," and irresponsible in the extreme--failings that cost him and his teammates their lives. Yet for all of Scott's real or exaggerated faults, he understood far better than Amundsen the power of a well-crafted sentence. Scott's diaries were recovered and widely published, and if the world insisted on lionizing Scott, it was partly because he told a better story. Huntford's bias aside, it's clear that both Scott and Amundsen were valiant and deeply flawed. "Scott ... had set out to be an heroic example. Amundsen merely wanted to be first at the pole. Both had their prayers answered." --Svenja Soldovieri

Mawson's Will: The Greatest Polar Survival Story Ever Written

Lennard Bickel

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 25 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

MAWSON'S WILL is the dramatic story of what Sir Edmund Hillary calls "the most outstanding solo journey ever recorded in Antarctic history." For weeks in Antarctica, Douglas Mawson faced some of the most daunting conditions ever known to man: blistering wind, snow, and cold; loss of his companion, his dogs and supplies, the skin on his hands and the soles of his feet; thirst, starvation, disease, snowblindness - and he survived.
Sir Douglas Mawson is remembered as the young Australian who would not go to the South Pole with Robert Scott in 1911, choosing instead to lead his own expedition on the less glamorous mission of charting nearly 1,500 miles of Antarctic coastline and claiming its resources for the British Crown. His party of three set out through the mountains across glaciers in 60-mile-per-hour winds. Six weeks and 320 miles out, one man fell into a crevasse, along with the tent, most of the equipment, all of the dogs' food, and all except a week's supply of the men's provisions.
Mawson's Will is the unforgettable story of one man's ingenious practicality and unbreakable spirit and how he continued his meticulous scientific observations even in the face of death. When the expedition was over, Mawson had added more territory to the Antarctic map than anyone else of his time. Thanks to Bickel's moving account, Mawson can be remembered for the vision and dedication that make him one of the world's great explorers.

"A riveting account . . . makes Mawson's achievement a symbol of the desire to live." -- The New York Times Book Review

"A powerful reading experience." -- Publishers Weekly

The Crystal Desert: Summers in Antarctica

David G. Campbell

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 10 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Not About Antarctica 2 out of 5 stars.
29 of 33 people found this review helpful.

This was a disappointing read, mainly because it isn't about Antarctica, but about King George Island. Like writing a book about North America from research conducted on Cuba. Yes, Cuba is part of North America, but... If you want information on Antarctica, look elsewhere. Why he named it "Crystal Desert" is beyond me because there is NOTHING on the ice cap. Secondly, Campbell, who may or may not be a competent biologist, spends far to much time grinding his environmental axe. For some reason, he thinks he and other academicians are the only people with the right to go to Antarctica, making numerous disparaging comments about tourism throughout the text. Moreover, he seems to have a major problem with males - be they human, sperm whale, or elephant seal, espousing traits such as "machismo" and other derogatory human emotions to these animals simply because they are larger than the females. And finally, he spends the entire final third of the book expounding on the horrors of the seal and whale hunts that decimated the populations of these magnificant animals. Unfortunate, definately. But the book is supposed to be about Antarctica - not a treatise on over-sealing and over-whaling by people from another period in time. It does have some good descriptions of Admiralty Bay on King George Island - mainly from a biological perspective, but overall, it was a waste of time.

Editorial Review:

In The Crystal Desert David Campbell weaves together travelogue gathered from his many visits to the wind-blasted continent of Antarctica, along with natural history, oceanography, and accounts of the tortured attempts of earlier exploratory missions "in an alien environment, beyond the edge of the habitable earth." He's a gifted writer with an especially fine hand at making his readers feel right at home in a place very few of us will ever get to see. Armchair travelers couldn't ask for a better book, no matter what the season.

A Brief History of the Vikings: The Last Pagans or the First Modern Europeans? (Brief History Series)

Jonathan Clements

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Total reviews: 5 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

Between the eighth and eleventh centuries, the Vikings surged from their Scandinavian homeland to trade and raid along the coasts of Europe. Their influence extended from Newfoundland to Baghdad, their battles were as far-flung as Africa and the Arctic. But were they great seafarers or desperate outcasts, noble heathens or oafish pirates, the last pagans or the first of the modern Europeans? This concise study puts medieval chronicles, Norse sagas and Muslim accounts alongside more recent research into ritual magic, genetic profiling and climatology. It includes biographical sketches of some of the most famous Vikings, from Erik Bloodaxe to Saint Olaf, from King Canute to Leif the Lucky. Extending beyond the traditional ‘Viking age' of most books, A Brief History of the Vikings also places sudden Scandinavian population movements in a wider historical context. It presents a balanced appraisal of these infamous sea kings, explaining both their swift expansion and its supposed halt. Supposed because the Vikings never really went away. Instead, posits Clements, they became a part of who we are today.

Ada BlackJack: A True Story of Survival in the Arctic

Jennifer Niven

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 28 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Fascinating story 5 out of 5 stars.
4 of 4 people found this review helpful.

I loved this book. It joins a spate of other books constructed in much the same way. It is reminiscent of James Michner'ss books, with the construction of personal stories amid the history. The research she did was wonderful. It is interesting how one event can ripple out and connect with and touch so many other lives. This was not even what would be termed a particularly charged event (such as one that would garner world news coverage), yet led to connections everywhere. It is fascinating and she has done a wonderful job with it. I was fascinated with the historical beginnings of Chautauqua. In the present gas crunch it seems like they might be looking at bringing back the concept. What a delightful thought - to have all of that wonderful esoteric knowledge traveling all over the country.

The character of Ada was fascinating. A young Native American who, to hear the boys tell it, wanted nothing more that a white man. After escaping a marriage to an abusive previous husband she is looking for more stability in her life and dealing with a serious case of northern SAD. To make things worse she has not been raised as totally `native' as they thought she had. The general perceptions that regular society in general had for this woman were heartbreaking and incorrect. A sexuality that in an educated Caucasian society is viewed as normal becomes promiscuous in the Native American. Verbalization is different. The totemic thought form is different. I felt that the way the author dealt with these issues was wonderful. Rather than infuse the book with a condescending attitude she simply stated what had happened.

Ada was a strong woman but it seems that some of the troubles and betrayals she went through took a toll on her heart and health. I wonder if we as a society will ever figure out a way to `develop character' without beating people senseless. There was one line that was particularly moving.

I would recommend this book to anyone. It was wonderful and a great way to learn history. After reading this I'll have to read her first book.

Editorial Review:

Now in paperback, the gripping and inspiring tale of a woman's survival alone in the Arctic.

In 1921, four men and one woman ventured deep into the Arctic. Two years later, only one returned.

When 23-year-old Inuit Ada Blackjack signed on as a seamstress for a top-secret Arctic expedition, her goal was simple: earn money and find a husband. But her terrifying experiences -- both in the wild and back in civilization -- comprise one of the most amazing untold adventures of the 20th century. Based on a wealth of unpublished materials, including Ada's never-before-seen diaries, bestselling author Jennifer Niven narrates this true story of an unheralded woman who became an unlikely hero.