Publication date: 1998-03
Dewey code: 920
RRP: £8.99
Price: £6.31
Review On My Brother's Shoulders: The Story of a Mekong Moses / Wakefield Press:
Publication date: 1990-10-29
Price: £14.95
Review Inside Stalin's Gulag: A True Story of Survival / Book Guild Ltd:
Creator: Sir Edmund Hillary
Publication date: 1999-03-29
RRP: £12.99
Price: £9.66
Review Eric Shipton: Everest and Beyond / Constable:
Publication date: 2004-07-01
Dewey code: 622.342209227191
RRP: £11.50
Price: £7.58
Review Rivers of Gold: A True Yukon Story / Hancock House Publishers Ltd ,Canada:
Publication date: 2000-07-03
Price: £19.99
Review To the Top of the World: Climbing the World's 14 Highest Mountains / Collins:
Edition: New Ed
Publication date: 1999-07-08
Price: £12.99
Review Endurance: The True Story of Shackleton's Incredible Voyage to the Antarctic / Weidenfeld & Nicolson:You can't really fail with a book about the Endurance. Although Ernest Shackleton's attempt to make the first Trans-Antarctic crossing barely made it out of base camp, his expedition has gone into the history books as one of the great epics of polar travel. Endurance left England in August 1914 and reached the pack-ice off Antarctica in January the following year. It sank in November, crushed by the weight of the ice, leaving Shackleton and his 27 men stranded in one of the most desolate areas of the world with no hope of rescue. Undaunted, Shackleton led his team to the edge of the ice, dragging three open life-boats that had been salvaged from the Endurance every step of the way. They then sailed to Elephant Island, a remote uninhabited outcrop of rock, where they lived off penguins and seagull. By April 1916, Shackleton realised there was no chance of them being spotted by a passing ship and he and five men set sail in the open-decked 20-foot boat, the James Caird, across 650 miles of the stormiest seas of the southern oceans for South Georgia. After narrowly surviving being shipwrecked on the reefs surrounding the western coast of South Georgia, Shackleton then proceeded to make the first-ever crossing of the mountainous island before reaching the sanctuary of the whaling station at Stromness. And it was Shackleton, in person, who led the rescue mission to Elephant Island to pick up the rest of his men. Miraculously, all 28 men survived. [+]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.
Publication date: 2004-05-20
Dewey code: 306.362092
RRP: £13.50
Price: £8.90
Review Recollections of a Former Slave (Classics in Black Studies) / Prometheus Books:
Creator: James O'Reilly
Publication date: 2000-01-04
Dewey code: 904
RRP: £10.99
Price: £3.99
Review Danger!: True Stories of Trouble and Survival (Travelers' Tales Guides): True Stories of Trouble and Survival (Travelers' Tales Guides) / Travelers' Tales,U.S.:
Publication date: 2000-11-10
RRP: £16.99
Price: £1.50
Review The Ice Master / Macmillan:Eighty-five years after a famous, but ill-equipped, Canadian Arctic expedition of 1913 had sacrificed 16 lives, some artefacts appeared on an Internet auction site. They had originated at a "ghost camp" discovered i n 1924 where four of the expedition's 28 men, one woman and two children had perished. Jennifer Niven has completed the unfulfilled mission of survivor William McKinlay to produce a "more honest and revealing account" of the wreck of the Karluk and its aftermath. The explorers became split into several dispersed groups living "in the shadow of death". Their simultaneous grim and gruesome experiences are interwoven in this minutely detailed and atmospheric retelling, created by combining and comparing separate first-hand accounts and other sources. The characters are vividly recreated, from the expedition's self-interested leader, whom McKinlay named "a consummate liar and cheat", to the heroic ship's master who struggled over 700 miles to organise a rescue. Supplemented by haunting and fascinating photographs, The Ice Master can be harrowing and touching. It makes exciting and compulsive reading. This is a momentous story of the Arctic; of adventure, misadventure and the heights of human endurance. But it is also a story of human failings and the waste of young lives, as poignant now as it was when it was big news in 1914. [+]-Karen Tiley.
Publication date: 1995-01-26
RRP: £16.99
Price: £4.75
Review Sacred Games / Hamish Hamilton Ltd:
Publication date: 1999-06-30
RRP: £14.99
Price: £29.86
Review Flirting with Mermaids: The Unpredictable Life of a Sailboat Delivery Skipper (Sheridan House) / Adlard Coles Nautical:
Publication date: 2007-07-02
RRP: £12.99
Price: £12.98
Review Unbroken Spirit: How a Young Muslim Refused to Be Enslaved by Her Culture / Hodder & Stoughton Ltd:
Publication date: 2002-10-03
Dewey code: 910.4
RRP: £12.50
Price: £0.25
Review The White Lantern and Other Pursuits / Pimlico:
Authors
- John E. Elder
- Peter Hillary
Dewey code: 796
Price: £15.99
Review In the Ghost Country: A Lifetime Spent on the Edge / Mainstream Publishing:
Publication date: 1995-08-15
Dewey code: 823.914
Price: £7.99
Review "Titanic" / Minerva Press:
Publication date: 2003-12
RRP: £10.50
Price: £6.93
Review Dogs Daughter: My Life in Communist China and Liberal America / Times Editions:
Publication date: 2001-12-01
Dewey code: 910
RRP: £13.50
Price: £7.68
Review The Cockpit: A Flight of Escape and Discovery / ebrandedbooks.com,US:
Publication date: 2004-11-24
RRP: £13.95
Price: £9.19
Review The Crowing of the Roosters / David Phillips Publishers:
Authors
- John Packwood
- Jane Amestoy
RRP: £15.00
Price: £15.00
Review Extradited!: One Man's Prison Hell and His Lover's Fight for Justice / East Street Publications:
Creator: Sean Barrett
Edition: Unabridged
Publication date: 1999-04
RRP: £31.95
Price: £33.94
Review Close to the Wind: An Extraordinary Story of Triumph Over Adversity: Complete & Unabridged / ISIS Audio Books:On December 25, 1996, Pete Goss turned his 50-ft yacht Aqua Quorum back into a hurricane- force headwind to rescue French sailor Raphael Dinelli. He risked his life and any chance of winning one of the world's great yachting challenges-the Vendeé Globe non-stop, single- handed, round-the- world race. Instead, he was awarded France's highest honour-the Legion d'Honneur-and an MBE in the 1998 New Year's Honour List. Close to the Wind is Goss's story. He starts with the years of preparation as a merchant seaman and skipper on one of the 10 yachts in Chay Blyth's British Steel Challenge. He describes how he attempted to get sponsorship but was constantly rebuffed and he discusses the hardships he faced-nights spent sleeping on platforms before business meetings because there was no money to spare for a room. The drama of the Vendee is recounted in detail, down to Goss's having to operate on his elbow without anaesthetic and with the assistance only of faxed instructions. And will he race again? He plans to set off on in a 115-ft catamaran in The Race, December 2000.
| Models & Brands:
On My Brother's Shoulders: The Story of a Mekong Moses, Inside Stalin's Gulag: A True Story of Survival, Eric Shipton: Everest and Beyond, Rivers of Gold: A True Yukon Story, To the Top of the World: Climbing the World's 14 Highest Mountains, Endurance: The True Story of Shackleton's Incredible Voyage to the Antarctic, Recollections of a Former Slave (Classics in Black Studies), Danger!: True Stories of Trouble and Survival (Travelers' Tales Guides): True Stories of Trouble and Survival (Travelers' Tales Guides), The Ice Master, Sacred Games, Flirting with Mermaids: The Unpredictable Life of a Sailboat Delivery Skipper (Sheridan House), Unbroken Spirit: How a Young Muslim Refused to Be Enslaved by Her Culture, The White Lantern and Other Pursuits, In the Ghost Country: A Lifetime Spent on the Edge, "Titanic", Dogs Daughter: My Life in Communist China and Liberal America, The Cockpit: A Flight of Escape and Discovery, The Crowing of the Roosters, Extradited!: One Man's Prison Hell and His Lover's Fight for Justice, Close to the Wind: An Extraordinary Story of Triumph Over Adversity: Complete & Unabridged |
