Polar Adventures

A powerfully built man more than six feet tall, Amundsen's career of adventure began at the age of fifteen (he was born in Norway in 1872 to a family of merchant sea captains and rich ship owners). Twenty-five years later he was the first man to reach both the North and South Poles. The author, an adventurer and swimmer, author of Swimming to Antarctica, gives us in this new work a full-scale account of Amundsen's life and expeditions. We see Amundsen,...

"A Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, author of Where War Lives and expedition member describes how an unlikely combination of marine science and Inuit knowledge helped solve the mystery of the lost Franklin expedition of 1845,"--NoveList.

Brandt tells the fascinating whole story of the search for the Northwest Passage, from its beginnings early in the age of exploration through its development into a British national obsession to the final sordid, terrible descent into scurvy, starvation, and cannibalism.

"Bound for Antarctica, where polar explorer Ernest Shackleton planned to cross on foot the last uncharted continent, the Endurance set sail from England in August 1914. In January 1915, after battling its way for six weeks through a thousand miles of pack ice and now only a day's sail short of its destination, the Endurance became locked in an island of ice. For ten months the ice-moored Endurance drifted northwest before it was finally crushed. But...

Apsley Cherry-Garrard was the youngest member of Robert Falcon Scott's ill-fated 1910 expedition to the South Pole. One of just three men to survive the notorious journey, he draws on his firsthand experiences as well as the diaries of other compatriots to create a detailed account of Scott's legendary expedition.

A profile of Antarctica and its indigenous life traces the history of regional exploration and the science currently being conducted there while explaining how Antarctica reveals key insights into the planet's environmental future.

Henry Worsley was a devoted husband and father and a decorated British special forces officer who believed in honor and sacrifice. He was also a man obsessed. He spent his life idolizing Ernest Shackleton, the nineteenth-century polar explorer, who tried to become the first person to reach the South Pole, and later sought to cross Antarctica on foot. Shackleton never completed his journeys, but he repeatedly rescued his men from certain death, and...