Showing titles in Arctic & Antarctica

Douglas Mawson, born in 1882 and knighted in 1914, was Australia’s greatest Antarctic explorer. On 2 December 1911, he led an expedition from Hobart to explore the virgin frozen coastline below, 2000 miles of which had never felt the tread of a human foot. After setting up Main Base at Cape Denision and Western Base on Queen Mary Land, he headed east on an extraordinary sledging trek with his companions, Belgrave Ninnis and Dr Xavier Mertz. After tragedy struck, Mawson found himself all alone, 160 miles from safety, with next to no food.

As war clouds darkened over Europe in 1914, a party led by Sir Ernest Shackleton set out to make the first crossing of the entire Antarctic continent via the Pole. But their initial optimism was short-lived as ice floes closed around their ship, gradually crushing it and marooning twenty-eight men on the polar ice. Alone in the world's most unforgiving environment, Shackleton and his team began a brutal quest for survival.

Random House presents the audiobook edition of Erebus, written and read by Michael Palin. N_______________ THE SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER In the early years of Queen Victoria's reign, HMS Erebus undertook two of the most ambitious naval expeditions of all time. On the first, she ventured further...

In 1911, veteran explorer Sir Ernest Shackleton set out to lead the first expedition across Antarctica, the last unknown continent. Instead, his ship, the Endurance, became locked in sea ice, and for nine months, Shackleton fought a losing battle with the elements before the drifting ship was...

On 8 August 1914, five days after the outbreak of World War One, the Endurance, a wooden-hulled, coal-fired icebreaker, set sail for the South Pole, in a bid to complete the first-ever trans-Antarctic expedition, which would cross the continent from the Weddell Sea to Scott's base at Cape Evans, via the Pole. However, despite the best planning, the ship succumbs to the ice floes of the Weddell Sea, and is subjected to months of uncontrollable drifting before its crew makes a scramble for Elephant Island, where they battle constant cold and starvation.

The mesmerizing, larger-than-life tale of an eccentric adventurer who traversed some of the greatest frontiers of the twentieth century, from uncharted Arctic wastelands to the underground resistance networks of World War II. Deep in the Arctic wilderness, Peter Freuchen awoke to find himself...

In Leading on the Edge, successful business speaker and consultant Rachael Robertson shares the lessons she learned as leader of a year-long expedition to the wilds of Antarctica.

"Damron's subtle pacing manages the tension perfectly." —AudioFile on Empire of Ice and Stone "Listen to this if you want to hear a narrator at the top of his game recount a fascinating—and at times disturbing—true story of adventure, disaster, discovery, cannibalism, and more. Will Damron...

Ice Ghosts weaves together the epic story of the Lost Franklin Expedition of 1845 - whose two ships and crew of 129 were lost to the Arctic ice - with the modern tale of the scientists, divers, and local Inuit behind the incredible discovery of the flagship's wreck in 2014. Paul Watson, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist who was on the icebreaker that led the discovery expedition, tells a fast-paced historical adventure story: Sir John Franklin and the crew of the HMS Erebus and Terror setting off in search of the fabled Northwest Passage.

This gripping story of courage and achievement is an account of Robert Falcon Scott's last fateful expedition to the Antarctic, as told by surviving expedition member Apsley Cherry-Garrard. Cherry-Garrard tells of the journey from England to South Africa and southward to the ice floes, where...

Now a major Netflix film co-written by and starring Nikolaj Coster-Waldau (Game of Thrones) The harrowing, amazing, and often amusing personal account of two mismatched Arctic explorers who banded together to keep themselves sane on an historic expedition gone horribly wrong Ejnar Mikkelsen was...

Endurance: An Epic of Polar Adventure is Frank Worsley's first-hand account of one of the greatest survival stories ever told. As captain of the Endurance, Worsley recounts Sir Ernest Shackleton's ill-fated Antarctic expedition with remarkable clarity and immediacy, taking readers from the crushing grip of the pack ice to the extraordinary voyage that saved every member of the crew. Rich in detail and driven by the perspective of someone who lived through it, this is a gripping story of courage, leadership, and resilience in the face of overwhelming odds.

Antarctica is the most alien place on the planet, the only part of the Earth where humans could never survive unaided. Out of our fascination with it have come many books, most of which focus on only one aspect of its unique strangeness. None has managed to capture the whole story - until now. Drawing on her broad travels across the continent, in Antarctica Gabrielle Walker weaves all the significant threads of life on the vast ice sheet into an intricate tapestry, illuminating what it really feels like to be there and why it draws so many different kinds of people.

His two companions were dead, his food and supplies had vanished in a crevasse, and Douglas Mawson was still one hundred miles from camp. On January 17, 1913, alone and near starvation, Mawson, leader of the Australasian Antarctic Expedition, was hauling a sledge to get back to base camp. The...

The Great Polar Fraud explores the history of the three men who claimed the pole, their claims, and the subsequent doubts of those claims, effectively rewriting the history of polar exploration and putting Amundsen center stage as the rightful conqueror of both poles.

At the beginning of the twentieth century, the South Pole was the most coveted prize in the modern age of exploration. In this brilliant dual biography every detail of the great race to the South Pole during 1911-1912, between Britain's Robert Scott and Norway's Roald Amundsen, is examined and...

The enthralling and often harrowing history of the adventurers who searched for the Northwest Passage, the holy grail of nineteenth-century British exploration. After the triumphant end of the Napoleonic Wars in 1815, the British took it upon themselves to complete something they had been trying...

'An Antarctic odyssey; Shackleton and Scott star in this rip-roaring account' The Telegraph 'Delivered with pace, style and infectious enthusiasm, The Grip of the Ice sometimes chills you to the bone… stirring, suspenseful and panoramic.' Irish Independent The gripping untold story of...

In September 1921, four young men and Ada Blackjack, a diminutive 25-year-old Eskimo woman, ventured deep into the Arctic in a secret attempt to colonize desolate Wrangel Island for Great Britain. Two years later, Ada Blackjack emerged as the sole survivor of this ambitious polar expedition. This young, unskilled woman - who had headed to the Arctic in search of money and a husband - conquered the seemingly unconquerable north and survived all alone after her male companions had perished. 

Here is the story of the infamous 1910 race to the South Pole, as told by its fearless yet desperate leader, Robert Falcon Scott. The New York Times called Scott's Last Expedition "A splendid record of heroism not soon to be forgotten."