Endurance: Shackleton's Incredible Voyage by Alfred Lansing
|
List Price: Our Price: $7.37 You Save: $7.58 (51%) Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days Buy Used: from $0.40 (click here) Category: Book See more book details and other editions |
|---|
Book Reviews of Endurance: Shackleton's Incredible Voyage
Book Review: An exciting and compelling story
Summary: 5 Stars
The Endurance, Shackleton's Incredible Voyage, by Alfred Lansing is a great book. It is a great story. This is about Ernest Schackleton's greatest adventure. It is an excellent book. The book is an account of an event. This does not mean the book is boring. The story is real, but the events that take place in the book are unreal. For example, the story takes place over a period of two years, and the crew never touches or sees land, and lives solely on the boat and ice. The story also changes a lot because it is told from various perspectives, which makes the story move along, and gives each character a certain attitude, because a lot of the story is taken from. For instance, when the crew is on the boat, some of the men do not mind, while others think differently. This makes the story change, which makes the book interesting, and not monotonous unlike some other books of this genre. The book is also well written. Although the author was not on the expedition, he has done interviews with the crew, and has obtained all of their journals which was one of the few things they were allowed to keep. This book is not very new. It is similar to some of other adventure stories, like Into the Wild, The Perfect Storm, and Into Thin Air. The difference is that it brings the genre to a new level. It is more interesting, and has a better story that it was based on. I had never read anything on Alfred Lansing, but this book may make me want to read more. Overall I like this book. It didn't get the last half star because I thought it was too long, but I don't like anything over 200 pages, so that is my own personal bias.Book Review: Fab!
Summary: 5 Stars
Excellent reading. I am an avid reader (about one book a week) and this certainly ranks near the top of what I've read this year. I was first turned on to the general subject after reading "The Worst Journey in the World," the story of Scott's ill fated South Pole expedition. Although I found that book a little long winded, there was no doubting the passion, courage, and emotions of the setting.I found Lansing's book to be a very easy read mixing just the right amount of detail and back story. Although you do not get a good picture of all 27 survivors, you do get a strong picture of the dozen or so key men. That would be the only fault in this narrative, but I suppose there are other sources to get the whole shabang. I would have like to have seen a "where are they now" sort of afterword, but nonetheless, the story is a solid, adventurous, unbelievable exhibit of man against nature and will against calamity.
The story is very easy to follow. It has perhaps one of the greatest opening lines to a book ever "The order to abandon ship was given at 5:00 p.m." It is a real page turner.
Highly recommended reading. I don't think I will ever utter the words "I'm freezing" or "I'm starving" again.
Also, you must rent/buy the Enurance DVD narrated by Liam Neeson. This is an amazing DVD. Besides the beautiful tale that Lansing has brough to us, the only thing more amazing is to see the actual pictures and movie footage taken by Hurley (one of the survivors). Some of the shots are simply breathtaking. The DVD is the cherry on top.
Book Review: They wore wool
Summary: 5 Stars
An earlier reviewer, with experience of frigid conditions in Alaska, cast some doubt on the ability of these men survive while wet in below zero temperatures and howling wind chill factors. It does sound incredible, especially when they were in the boats with no source of heat. But I note that they wore mostly wool undergarments, trousers and sweaters, with gabardine overcoats. Also fur-lined boots. Gabardine, at least back then, was made of worsted wool. Their sleeping bags, often soaked as well, were made from reindeer hides. Fur-lined, that is. I also note Allan Frey's excellent survival book, based on 40 years of living in the Yukon territory, often in a teepee. He prefers wool as well -- and I have cashed in some of my outdoor gear for wool pants and parka. It retains insulating qualities even while soaked and compressed. How else do you think the critters who originally wore it survived outdoors without tents or roofs over their horned heads?
Had these men slept in and been garbed in what most outdoorsmen wear today -- down shrouded in nylon or polyester -- we wouldn't be reading this phenomenal book because they would all have perished in the first year. Even the newest miracle fillings -- Hollofil and the like -- would have blown out of their shredded shells like that down wafting from weeds in the Spring. I don't think they had duct tape for patching such shells back then -- a common site among modern outdoorsmen in their Michelin-man coats.
Yes, in a long, dire emergency -- give me Shackleton every time. And I had btter be clad in leather and wool.
Book Review: Beyond Unimaginable
Summary: 5 Stars
I literally couldn't put this book down. And that rarely happens. Yes, the story begins slowly as Lansing has to give us some background on the crew and some context for the expedition, which goes as planned for the first few months. But both the story and Lansing's telling of it become increasingly compelling as the events become more and more unbearable. I mean, think about being stuck on a floating island of ice for 5 months, eating seals and penguins, exposed continually to sub-freezing (even sub-zero) conditions roughly 1000 miles from civilization's last outpost. And the truly horrendous conditions are yet to come! The story pushes you well into the territory of the unimaginable... and just keeps going. There seems no end to their trials, no constraints on the degree of their suffering. And yet all survive.
Others have said the Lansing version is the best, and I was very satisfied to read it first. It has narrative power. But I would also recommend you buy Caroline Alexander's book as a companion, mainly for Hurley's amazing photos but also for even more context on the flawed aspects of most expeditions during this period and the class differences among the Endurance's crew.
Still, this a story everyone should know. It really stretches the limits of what one imagines is humanly possible for one to endure. It's as if Shackleton and his men made definitive claim, for all time, to some capacity for survival that should make us all potentially much stronger than we tend to think we are.
Book Review: Reading in it's amazing best
Summary: 5 Stars
This is a superbly written account of an Antarctic expedition led by Sir Ernest Shakleton on a ship named Endurance. It is trapped by ice and eventually crushed by it. In order to survive, the crew look toward it's leader for answers and the only chance at rescue is to make it to a whaling station that is more than 1500 miles away. Everything is frozen, the weather is the worst on earth and thats just the begining. It's all here, the amazing spirit that some humans show when pushed to the brink of death, starvation, freezing, thirst, tiredness to the deepest parts of one's existence, humor, friendship, respect, leadership, etc. How it must have been for these men to survive such a harrowing experience is beyond belief. If not because it was so well documented by the individual crew members who kept journals, indeed no one would beleive it. To have survived so many months floating on a moving, cracking, shifting, crushing ice floe only to have to undertake an 800 mile sea voyage in a 22 foot lifeboat in the most brutal ocean in the world where winds rarely fall below huricane force, find and land on a hellish coast of a small island easily missed. Then on foot and starving have to coss it on ground so treacherous that no one had crossed it before, or would dare again for another 50 yrs. A brutal reading that will leave you exhausted. Pass it on and share with your friends and family.