Endurance by Alfred Lansing.
10/10
For anyone who’s read man vs nature stories like The Perfect Storm, Into The Wild and Into Thin Air, this one is a must read. The incredible, terrifying and TRUE story of Ernest Shackelton’s expedition to Antarctica. This story is so incredible that, if it had been fiction, the editor surely would have rejected it as absurdly beyond belief. Here’s what’s on the back cover:
“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 inside an island of ice. For ten months the ice-moored Endurance drifted northwest before it was finally crushed. But for Shackleton and his crew of twenty-seven men the ordeal had barely begun. It would end only after a near-miraculous journey by Shackleton and a skeleton crew through over 850 miles of the South Atlantic’s heaviest seas to the closest outpost of civilization. This astonishing tale of survival by Shackleton and all twenty-seven of his men for over a year on the ice-bound Antarctic seas, as Time magazine put it, “defined heroism.” Alfred Lansing’s brilliantly narrated book has been long been acknowledged as the definitive account of the Endurance’s fateful trip.”
A truly outstanding read of an impossible story, made all the more incredible because the story is true.
A must read!
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