Endurance: Shackleton's Incredible Voyage: The True Story of Shackleton's Incredible Voyage to the Antarctic - Hardcover

Alfred Lansing's book, first published in 1957, tells it as it was. He draws heavily on the diaries and other first-person memoirs of those involved, and he writes with both style and pace. As such it is the classic tale of derring-do. What Lansing misses, though, is the social context. He provides little sense of history; in August 1914, when the Endurance left England, World War One was starting. By the time he returned home two years later, thousands of young men of his generation were lying dead on the battlefields of the Somme. The contrast is almost unbearable but Lansing makes nothing of it. Similarly he does not explain how someone like Scott, whose South Pole expedition several years earlier had been an unmitigated disaster of incompetence and bad planning, should go down in British history as one of our all-time heroes, while Shackleton, whose exploits were indeed truly heroic, has lived for so long in Scott's shadow. --John Crace

In the summer of 1914, Sir Ernest Shackleton set off aboard the Endur ance bound for the South Atlantic. The goal of his expedition was to cross t he Antarctic overland, but more than a year later, and still half a continent aw ay from the intended base, the Endurance was trapped in ice and eventuall y was crushed. For five months Shackleton and his crew survived on drifting ice packs in one of the most savage regions of the world before they were finally ab le to set sail again in one of the ship's lifeboats. Alfred Lansing's Enduran ce: Shackleton's Incredible Voyage is a white-knuckle account of this astoun ding odyssey.

Through the diaries of team members and interviews with survivo rs, Lansing reconstructs the months of terror and hardship the Endurance crew suffered. In October of 1915, there "were no helicopters, no Weasels, no Sno-Cats, no suitable planes. Thus their plight was naked and terrifying in i ts simplicity. If they were to get out--they had to get themselves out." Ho w Shackleton did indeed get them out without the loss of a single life is at the heart of Lansing's magnificent true-life adventure tale. -- Amazon.