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Summary: Our Testosterone-Fueled Book Club Ate This Up
Review: With a guy's book club you have to be careful. Very careful. Any sensitivity, insight, english-class oriented stuff MUST be masked behind serious over-the-top adventure and action. This book hit the mark with a bullseye.
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Summary: Fascinating tale of survival
Review: I read this on a friend's recommendation and was not disappointed. I couldn't put the book down and easily read it in two days. There are 4 daring adventures: 1. Getting stuck in an ice flow, 2. Surviving on a desolate island in Antartica, 3. An incredible, lucky journey by a small boat returning to civilization, & 4. crossing the final few miles to civilization on land. I don't think I've given away the book because reading how they got into this jam and then get out of it is totally unbelievable. I recommend this book to readers interested in adventures, war stories and nature. Truly this book shows the real power of natural forces.
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Summary: Impressive, Enjoyable, Well-Illustrated Read
Review: Shackleton is "hot" right now. The Mugar IMAX theater at the Boston Museum of Science is showing a great documentary on Shackleton's Antarctic adventure. I strongly recommend this book to those interested in Shackleton, the Antarctic, or exploration/adventuring. The photographs (by Hurley, the expedition's photographer) are superb, and add greatly to the experience. The ordeal that Shackleton and his men suffered is almost beyond comprehension--and his success in bringing home safely EVERY MAN is awe-inspiring. There are many facets to this tale: nature, leadership, courage, perseverence, navigational skill, loyalty......it covers a broad range. Enjoy!
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Summary: well written and precisely told
Review: This harrowing memoir is written predominantly through the diaries kept by the men aboard the Endurance. The diaries were barely ledgible at times, according to the author, but were invaluable in terms of information. Other sources for the book were "eyewitness" accounts from the survivors of the journey, including Dr. Alexander H. Macklin. Thus, creating a very accurate and dramatic "true-life" story. Not only is the story told, but the atmosphere and emotions of the crew and their surroundings are shown, and one gets the feeling of what is was like for these men in the early 1900's adrift on ice packs and marooned on unliveable land for more than a years time. The story is well written, fast paced and tells several parts of the tale at different intervals during the book which makes it very easily followed. If you enjoy historical accounts or are fascinated with Antartica itself....this is a must-read book.
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Summary: Cripes!
Review: Alfred Lansing subtitled his book, Endurance, as "The Greatest Adventure Story Ever Told." That's a tall claim, and he may be right. In terms of the limits of hardship the human body can endure, only one book rivals this incredible true story: Slavomir Rawicz's "The Long Walk" (which I enthusiastically recommend). In 1914, Sir Ernest Shackleton, a veteran of two previous Antarctic expeditions, and his crew of 26 men and an eighteen-year-old stowaway-who later has his frostbitten and gangrenous foot amputated-set sail for Antarctica aboard the worthy ship, Endurance, determined to be the first men to sledge across the full breadth of the continent. They never get there. Beset in ice floes just off the coast of Antarctica, ship and crew begin a two-year ordeal of cold, hunger, monotony, loneliness, and despair as they are dragged helplessly around the vicious Weddell Sea by pack ice. The ship is crushed by the ice before the first year is out, forcing the crew onto the ice. This begins an excruciating existence of basic survival against all odds as the pack drifts slowly north, forcing them onto ever diminishing floes, and eventually to the ship's life boats. Near death, the crew finally reaches hellish and uninhabited Elephant Island after nearly two years. This is before functional radio. There are no satellites, no phones. No one in the world knows where they are. They have been given up for dead by the civilized world thousands of miles away and preoccupied by World War I. Their only hope for salvation is for Shackleton and five others to take the best of the three boats, an open, 22-foot life boat, and sail it 870 miles across the worst seas on earth to the whaling station on South Georgia Island and return to rescue the others before they freeze or starve to death. After landing on South Georgia, they're forced to trek on foot across the frozen island to reach the whaling station, a feat never before attempted and rarely since accomplished. The scene Lansing paints as Shackleton and two others trudge into this camp as gaunt and grimy, bearded and long-haired living ghosts in rags, is so moving I had to get up and walk around for a while after reading it. I got seasick on a cruise ship in the Caribbean once, and wanted to die. What these heroes stoically endured is simply beyond comprehension. And hurray to Lansing for his research and writing effort. As a writer myself, I see one of the major challenges in writing this book as how to keep the text fresh and the excitement going, when in reality each day of the expedition was a boring repetition of cold, hunger, worry, ice, and more ice. But this is the epitome of a page-turner. Why isn't it a major movie? -Christopher Bonn Jonnes, author of Wake Up Dead.
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Summary: Dare you to read this and not be moved
Review: Wow! What a powerful story. If this book was fictional, you'd say it was too impossible to be true. But it is true. The story is the book. Shackelton and his men endure almost two years of amazing danger and hardship. You can read some of the other 200 plus reviews for details. I haven't read any of the other versions of this story. I'm just glad that somehow a 1959 book found it's way back to the lists of books to read. Is it dated? Possibly. I can only suspect that Lansing sugarcoats some of the tensions that surely existed. However, unlike more recent versions, there were still living survivors of the party at that time. The book benefits from Lansing's ability to interview them but one suspects that he also edited the book to honor their sensibilities. Bottom-line: Don't complain about your heating bills or not being able to decide what to wear until you've read this powerful tale.
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Summary: Endurance
Review: From the very first sentance this book was addictive. I simply could not put it down. This adventure sets the benchmark all other pretenders to the title. Ten stars would be due, but alas, only 5 to give. To think that, through this terrible ordeal, not one person was lost is just plain unbelievable but nevertheless true. The pages dealing with the sailing of the Drake passage make all other sailing/sea adventures seem quite tame. No other book that I have come across can convey the incredible suffering, fortitude and bravery of Shakleton and his men. This book is a must-read for anyone that has any sense of adventure, and if not, they will surely find one within these pages. What truly amazed me is the fact that Shakleton managed to preserve all of the photographic and film records of this adventure. This would at first seem to indicate that the hardships were not as great as at first perceived, but after thinking about this feat, it becomes more, not less, incredible. To have such high adventure actually documented is rare. READ IT !!!
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Summary: Beyond Unimaginable
Review: 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.
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Summary: Puts all other polar books to shame
Review: Alfred Lansing's "Endurance" is quite simply the definitive version of Ernest Shackleton's ill-fated 1914 expedition to Antarctica. He was supposed to lead the first people to cross the Antarctic continent, but his ship, the "Endurance," was trapped and crushed in the polar ice, leaving his group stranded and entirely on their own. It's quite possibly the greatest polar adventure story of all time. Based on numerous interviews and other meticulous forms of research, Lansing tells the story in great but not stupefying detail. He draws the reader in and makes you feel like you are actually standing on that ice floe with Shackleton, watching the ship disintegrate. He does a much better job of telling the story than Shackleton himself did in his book "South." Although there have been many retellings of the "Endurance" story, both on page and on film (most recently A&E's "Shackleton" dramatization), none are as compelling or as readable as Lansing's book. Check it out; you will be enthralled.
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Summary: Even knowing the ending, it's a page turner
Review: I'm a fan of survivalist accounts such as "Seven Years in Tibet," and "In the Heart of the Sea." And I loved this true account of the voyage/survival of Shackleton's crew in the Antarctic. Asking friends and relatives if they've read it, I've heard, "I started it, but I didn't want to see everyone die!" So here's the *spoiler...nobody dies! * The capacity of the human body to survive and of the human brain to figure out how to do it never ceases to amaze me. Lansing's account ingeniously pieces together journals of the men involved and includes riveting details without ever being too gory. Even knowing the ending, it's a page turner. I've heard that this is the most involving of all the accounts published...coming across more like a story and less a documentary. The images of the men on the ice have completely captivated me...the sounds and the movement. Be prepared to grab a blanket and a snack as you read (something not made of penguin)...you'll feel like you're there.
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