The History Book Club discussion
EXPLORE-INVENT-PIONEERS-WEATHER
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EXPLORERS AND EXPLORATION
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by Andrew Lambert (no photo)Synopsis:
Andrew Lambert, a leading authority on naval history, reexamines the life of Sir John Franklin and his final, doomed Arctic voyage. Franklin was a man of his time, fascinated, even obsessed with, the need to explore the world; he had already mapped nearly two-thirds of the northern coastline of North America when he undertook his third Arctic voyage in 1845, at the age of fifty-nine.
His two ships were fitted with the latest equipment; steam engines enabled them to navigate the pack ice, and he and his crew had a three-year supply of preserved and tinned food and more than one thousand books. Despite these preparations, the voyage ended in catastrophe: the ships became imprisoned in the ice, and the men were wracked by disease and ultimately wiped out by hypothermia, scurvy, and cannibalism.
Franklin’s mission was ostensibly to find the elusive North West Passage, a viable sea route between Europe and Asia reputed to lie north of the American continent. Lambert shows for the first time that there were other scientific goals for the voyage and that the disaster can only be understood by reconsidering the original objectives of the mission. Franklin, commonly dismissed as a bumbling fool, emerges as a more important and impressive figure, in fact, a hero of navigational science.
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Pierre BertonSynopsis:
Scores of nineteenth-century expeditions battled savage cold, relentless ice and winter darkness in pursuit of two great prizes: the quest for the elusive Passage linking the Atlantic and the Pacific and the international race to reach the North Pole. Pierre Berton's #1 best-selling book brings to life the great explorers: the pious and ambitious Edward Parry, the flawed hero John Franklin, ruthless Robert Peary and the cool Norwegian Roald Amundsen. He also credits the Inuit, whose tracking and hunting skills saved the lives of the adventurers and their men countless times.
These quests are peopled with remarkable figures full of passion and eccentricity. They include Charles Hall, an obscure printer who abandoned family and business to head to a frozen world of which he knew nothing; John Ross, whose naval career ended when he spotted a range of mountains that didn't exist; Frederick Cook, who faked reaching the North Pole; and Jane Franklin, who forced an expensive search for her missing husband upon a reluctant British government.
Pierre Berton, who won his first Governor General's award for The Mysterious North, here again gives us an important and fascinating history that reads like a novel as he examines the historic events of the golden age of Arctic exploration.
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by Frank T. Kryza (no photo)Synopsis:
The incredible true story of Alexander Gordon Laing and the race to discover Timbuktu during the early part of the 19th century––a time when the African continent was still largely uncharted.
In the first decades of 19th century, no place burned more brightly in the imagination of European geographers––and fortune hunters––than the lost city of Timbuktu. Like the mythical city of El Dorado, the very real Timbuktu held the promise of wealth and fame. Whoever got there first was guaranteed worldwide renown. Yet, though many had tried, no European explorer had been there and returned since the Middle Ages. In fact, Europeans knew more about the geography of the moon than they did of North and Central Africa. In 1824, the French Geographical Society offered a cash prize for the first expedition from any nation to return from Timbuktu. The announcement fueled the already intense rivalry between the French and the British for control of the African interior. The British, unwilling to depend on the fate of one explorer, sent several "African travelers" on their way.
The Race for Timbuktu focuses on two of these men: Alexander Gordon Laing, the book's protagonist and "voice," and Hugh Clapperton, the man who would become his greatest rival. Though their superiors had hoped the men would work together, instead the two became fierce opponents, each convinced that discovery of Timbuktu was his fate alone.
The Race for Timbuktu follows Laing and Clapperton on their arduous journeys across the unforgiving Sahara, in constant battle against the elements, illness, attack, and time, to be the first white man to reach the fabled gates of Timbuktu. The story of their expeditions also serves as a narrative history of the European colonization of Africa including the competition between England and France to stake out African claims, the collusions of Arabs and Africans against Europeans over the slave trade, and the violent confrontation of Islam with Christianity. As a result of the "Great Scramble" launched by African travelers' missions, in less than a century, nearly every square yard of Africa would be occupied by European nations.
The Race for Timbuktu offers a close personal look at the extraordinary people and pivotal events of 19th century African exploration that changed the course of history and the shape of the modern world.
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by Chris Turney (no photo)Synopsis:
“The South Pole discovered” trumpeted the front page of The Daily Chronicle on March 8, 1912, marking Roald Amundsen’s triumph over the tragic Robert Scott. Yet behind all the headlines there was a much bigger story. Antarctica was awash with expeditions. In 1912, five separate teams representing the old and new world were diligently embarking on scientific exploration beyond the edge of the known planet. Their discoveries not only enthralled the world, but changed our understanding of the planet forever. Tales of endurance, self-sacrifice, and technological innovation laid the foundations for modern scientific exploration, and inspired future generations.
To celebrate the centenary of this groundbreaking work, 1912: The Year the World Discovered Antarctica revisits the exploits of these different expeditions. Looking beyond the personalities and drawing on his own polar experience, Chris Turney shows how their discoveries marked the dawn of a new age in our understanding of the natural world. He makes use of original and exclusive unpublished archival material and weaves in the latest scientific findings to show how we might reawaken the public’s passion for discovery and exploration.
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by John Man (no photo)Synopsis:
Marco Polo’s late 13th-century journey from Venice, through Europe and most of Asia, to China is one of the most audacious in history. His account of his experiences, known simply as The Travels, uncovered an entirely new world of emperors and concubines, great buildings—"stately pleasure domes" in Coleridge’s dreaming, huge armies, and imperial riches. He revealed the wonders of Xanadu, where the emperor Kublai Khan spent his summers. His book shaped the West’s understanding of China for hundreds of years, inspiring Christopher Columbus, who was aiming for Kublai's China when he stumbled on America. John Man traveled in Marco Polo's footsteps to Xanadu, in search of the truth behind his stories; to separate legend from fact. He takes readers across north China to Xanadu, then to Beijing and through modern China, where Marco Polo's journey's can still be traced. Drawing on his own journey, archaeology, and archival study, John Man paints a vivid picture of the man behind the myth and the true story of the great court of Kublai Khan.
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by Brian W. Richardson Synopsis:
British Captain James Cook conducted three voyages of exploration into the Pacific Ocean between 1768 and 1780, and librarian Richardson says that not only the voyages themselves, but his account of them changed forever how Europeans thought about the world. Using the new ability to determine longitude reliably, he says, Cook demonstrated the existence and non-existence of places; located every place in a single, fixed grid of coordinates; and moved away from the continental coastlines into the vasts of the Pacific Ocean. Though he spent most of his time in places that other Europeans had already visited, he incorporated and reworked them into a single and updated description.
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by Charles Officer (no photo)Synopsis:
Inconstant and forbidding, the arctic has lured misguided voyagers into the cold for centuries--pushing them beyond the limits of their knowledge, technology, and endurance. A Fabulous Kingdom charts these quests and the eventual race for the North Pole, chronicling the lives and adventures that would eventually throw light on this "magical realm" of sunless winters. They follow the explorers from the early journeys of Viking Ottar to the daring exploits of Martin Frobisher, Henry Hudson, Frederick Cook, Robert Peary, and Richard Bird. The second edition features a section entitled "The New Arctic" that illuminates current scientific and environmental issues that threaten the region. Officer and Page discuss such topics as the science behind the melting of the polar ice; the endangered species that now depend on the ice, including polar bears, narwhals, walruses, and ringed seals; commerce in mining and natural resources, especially petroleum and natural gas; and predictions for the economic and environmental future of the region.
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by Peter O. Koch (no photo)Synopsis:
The European explorers who dared to face the perils of the unknown have in recent times been shrouded in controversy. No longer esteemed as heroes, except in their homelands, these bold explorers are seen as purveyors of disease, destruction and slavery whose only interests were finding gold, becoming famous and spreading their religious beliefs. But, as the author of this work points out, these explorers broke down long-standing myths and broadened the world's horizons.
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by Anthony Sattin (no photo)Synopsis:
London, 1788: a group of British gentlemen---geographers, scholars, politicians, humanitarians, and traders---decide it is time to solve the mysteries of Africa's unknown interior regions. Inspired by the Enlightenment quest for knowledge, they consider it a slur on the age that the interior of Africa still remains a mystery, that maps of the "dark continent" are populated with mythical beasts, imaginary landmarks, and fabled empires. As well, they hoped that more accurate knowledge of Africa would aid in the abolition of the slave trade.
These men, a mixed group of soldiers and gentlemen, ex-convicts, and social outcasts, form the African Association, the world's first geographical society, and over several decades send hardened, grizzled adventurers to replace speculation with facts and remove the beasts from the maps. The explorers who ventured forth included Mungo Park, whose account of his travels would be a bestseller for more than a century; American John Ledyard; and Jean Louis Burckhardt, the discoverer of Petra and Abu Simbel. Their exploits would include grueling crossings of the Sahara, the exploration of the Nile, and---most dramatically---the search for the great River Niger and its legendary city of gold: Timbuktu.
Anthony Sattin weaves the plotting of the London gentlemen and the experiences of their extraordinary explorers into a gripping account of high adventure, international intrigue, and geographical discovery. The Gates of Africa is a story of human courage and fatal ambition, a groundbreaking insight into the struggle to reveal the secrets of Africa.
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by Bruce Henderson (no photo)Synopsis:
In 1909, two men laid rival claims to this crown jewel of exploration. A century later, the battle rages still. This book is about one of the most enduring and vitriolic feuds in the history of exploration. "What a consummate cur he is," said Robert Peary of Frederick Cook in 1911. Cook responded, "Peary has stooped to every crime from rape to murder." They had started out as friends and shipmates, with Cook, a doctor, accompanying Peary, a civil engineer, on an expedition to northern Greenland in 1891. Peary's leg was shattered in an accident, and without Cook's care he might never have walked again. But by the summer of 1909, all the goodwill was gone. Peary said he had reached the Pole in September 1909; Cook scooped him, presenting evidence that he had gotten there in 1908. Bruce Henderson makes a wonderful narrative out of the claims and counterclaims, and he introduces fascinating scientific and psychological evidence to put the appalling details of polar travel in a new context.
An assembly of stories of those explorers who were determined but unprepared to find the elusive northwest passage.Arctic Labyrinth: The Quest for the Northwest Passagew
by Glyn Williams (no photo)Synopsis:
The elusive dream of locating the Northwest Passage—an ocean route over the top of North America that promised a shortcut to the fabulous wealth of Asia—obsessed explorers for centuries. While global warming has brought several such routes into existence, until recently these channels were hopelessly choked by impassible ice. Voyagers faced unimaginable horrors—entire ships crushed, mass starvation, disabling frostbite, even cannibalism—in pursuit of a futile goal. In Arctic Labyrinth, Glyn Williams charts the entire sweep of this extraordinary history, from the tiny, woefully equipped vessels of the first Tudor expeditions to the twentieth-century ventures that finally opened the Passage. Williams’s thrilling narrative delves into private letters and journals to expose the gritty reality behind the often self-serving accounts of those in charge. An important work of maritime history and exploration—and as exciting a tale of heroism and fortitude as readers will find—Arctic Labyrinth is also a remarkable study in human delusion.
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Beyond Capricorn: How Portuguese Adventurers Secretly Discovered And Mapped Australia And New Zealand 250 Years Before Captain Cook
by Peter Trickett (no photo)Synopsis:
The Portuguese have long been consider the pioneers of maritime exploration, initially thanks to Henry the Navigator's (1394-1460) interest in expanding the horizons of the known world. This was not strictly due to a desire for knowledge of the world, but more for the commercial benefits that might derived from new lands. By the time of Henry's death in 1460, Portuguese explorers had pushed well down the Atlantic coast of Africa, and by the turn of the 16th century, the Atlantic had been crossed and colonies established on the coast of South America. Within a few years, the spice trade was flourishing in the East Indies. It was commonly believed that a Great Southern continent existed to balance that of the European continent. Yet, despite the navigational skills and the natural curiosity of those skilled sailors sponsored by the European colonial powers, the great lands of Australia and New Zealand remained largely unmapped until around the 18th century. Or did they?
There have long been speculation that the first white men to discover Australia and New Zealand was not the Dutch, among whom is Abel Tasman, widely regarded as being the first European to sight New Zealand (despite the subtitle of Beyond Capricorn, Captain Cook did not discover Australia or New Zealand, but he certainly did accurately map much of the coastline of both countries). But if not the Dutch or the English, then who? Because of their well known skills in seafaring, as evidenced by their efforts in the Atlantic and Indian oceans, there is a school of thought that the Portuguese explorers penetrated much further into the Pacific than any one gave them credit for.
The Portuguese in the Age of Discovery 1300-1580
by David Nicolle (no photo)Synopsis:
From humble beginnings, in the course of three centuries the Portuguese built the world's first truly global empire, stretching from modern Brazil to sub-Saharan Africa and from India to the East Indies (Indonesia). Portugal had established its present-day borders by 1300 and the following century saw extensive warfare that confirmed Portugal's independence and allowed it to aspire to maritime expansion, sponsored by monarchs such as Prince Henry the Navigator.
Intent on finding a sea route to the source of the lucrative spice trade, the Portuguese discovered a route down Africa's western coast, employing the innovative caravel, a vessel that could be sailed closer to the wind than any other in use at the time. In 1488 Bartolomeu Dias rounded the Cape of Good Hope and ten years later Vasco da Gama reached India. In 1500 Pedro Álvares Cabral discovered Brazil and the Portuguese began to exploit the fabulous natural wealth of the Americas.
Victory over the Mamluks at the Battle of Diu (1509) handed the Portuguese control over the Indian Ocean and allowed them to capture a succession of key ports such as Ceylon, Goa and Malacca. Portuguese sailors continued to explore the coasts and islands of East Asia, and by 1580 a network of outposts linked Lisbon to a vast trading empire that stretched as far as Japan. The period closed with Portugal and its empire passing to Spanish control for 60 years from 1580.
During this nearly 300-year period, the Portuguese fought alongside other Iberian forces against the Moors of Andalusia; with English help successfully repelled a Castilian invasion (1385); and fought the Moors in Morocco, Africans, the Ottoman Turks, and the Spanish in colonial competition. The colourful and exotic Portuguese forces that prevailed in these battles on land and sea are the subject of this book.
Prince Henry "the Navigator": A Life
by Peter Russell (no photo)Synopsis:
This enthralling biography of the legendary 15th century Portuguese prince examines the full range of his activities as an imperialist and as a maritime, cartographical, and navigational pioneer. Russell shows his innovations set in motion changes that altered the history of Europe and regions far beyond.
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by Edward Dolnick (no photo)Synopsis:
On May 24, 1869 a one-armed Civil War veteran named John Wesley Powell and a ragtag band of nine mountain men embarked on the last great quest in the American West. No one had ever explored the fabled Grand Canyon, to adventurers of that era a region almost as mysterious as Atlantis -- and as perilous.
The ten men set out down the mighty Colorado River in wooden rowboats. Six survived. Drawing on rarely examined diaries and journals. Down the Great Unknown is the first book to tell the full, true story.
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Buddy LevySynopsis:
In 1541, the brutal conquistador Gonzalo Pizarro and his well-born lieutenant Francisco Orellana set off from Quito in search of La Canela, South America’s rumored Land of Cinnamon, and the fabled El Dorado, “the golden man.” Driving an enormous retinue of mercenaries, enslaved natives, horses, hunting dogs, and other animals across the Andes, they watched their proud expedition begin to disintegrate even before they descended into the nightmarish jungle, following the course of a powerful river. Soon hopelessly lost in the swampy labyrinth, their numbers diminishing daily through disease, starvation, and Indian attacks, Pizarro and Orellana made a fateful decision to separate. While Pizarro eventually returned home barefoot and in rags, Orellana and fifty-seven men, in a few fragile craft, continued downriver into the unknown reaches of the mighty Amazon, serenaded by native war drums and the eerie cries of exotic predators. Theirs would be the greater glory.
Interweaving eyewitness accounts of the quest with newly uncovered details, Buddy Levy reconstructs the seminal journey that has electrified adventurers ever since, as Orellana became the first European to navigate and explore the entire length of the world’s largest river. Levy gives a long-overdue account of the native populations—some peaceful and welcoming, offering sustenance and life-saving guidance, others ferociously hostile, subjecting the invaders to gauntlets of unremitting attack and intimations of terrifying rituals. And here is the Amazon itself, a powerful presence whose every twist and turn held the promise of new wonders both natural and man-made, as well as the ever-present risk of death—a river that would hold Orellana in its irresistible embrace to the end of his life.
Overflowing with violence and beauty, nobility and tragedy, River of Darkness is both riveting history and a breathtaking adventure that will sweep readers along on an epic voyage unlike any other.
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by Robert Goodwin (no photo)Synopsis:
Nearly two centuries before Meriwether Lewis and William Clark began their epic trek to the Pacific coast, a group of three Spanish noblemen and an African survived shipwreck, famine, Indian attack, and disease to make the first crossing of North America in recorded history. Drawing on contemporary accounts and long-lost records, Robert Goodwin tells the amazing story of their odyssey through the American South. Goodwin's groundbreaking research in original Spanish archives has led him to a radical new interpretation of American history—one in which an African slave named Esteban emerges as the nation's first great explorer and adventurer.
Esteban (1500–1539) is the first man born in Africa to die in North America about whom anything is known. The first African American with a name, he was also the first great pioneer from the Old World to explore the entirety of the American South with his three companions. In a feat of historical research, Goodwin takes us on an incredible adventure from Africa to Europe to America, filled with physical endurance, natural calamities, cannibalism, witchcraft, miraculous shamanism, and divine intervention—challenging the traditional history of the nation's discovery and placing Esteban at the heart of our historical record.
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by Derek J. Waller (no photo)Synopsis:
On a September day in 1863, Abdul Hamid entered the Central Asian city of Yarkand. Disguised as a merchant, Hamid was actually an employee of the Survey of India, carrying concealed instruments to enable him to map the geography of the area. Hamid did not live to provide a first-hand count of his travels. Nevertheless, he was the advance guard of an elite group of Indian trans-Himalayan explorers -- recruited, trained, and directed by the officers of the Great Trigonometrical Survey of India -- who were to traverse much of Tibet and Central Asia during the next thirty years.
Derek Waller presents the history of these explorers, who came to be called "native explorers" or "pundits" in the public documents of the Survey of India. In the closed files of the government of British India, however, they were given their true designation as spies. As they moved northward within the Indian subcontinent, the British demanded precise frontiers and sought orderly political and economic relationships with their neighbors. They were also becoming increasingly aware of and concerned with their ignorance of the geographical, political, and military complexion of the territories beyond the mountain frontiers of the Indian empire. This was particularly true of Tibet.
Though use of pundits was phased out in the 1890s in favor of purely British expeditions, they gathered an immense amount of information on the topography of the region, the customs of its inhabitants, and the nature of its government and military resources. They were able to travel to places where virtually no European count venture, and did so under conditions of extreme deprivation and great danger. They are responsible for documenting an area of over one million square miles, most of it completely unknown territory to the West. Now, thanks to Waller's efforts, their contributions to history will no longer remain forgotten.
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by Corey Ford (no photo)Synopsis:
Author Corey Ford writes the classic and moving story of naturalist Georg Whlhelm Steller, who served on the 1741-42 Russian Alaska expedition with explorer Vitus Bering. Steller was one of Europe's foremost naturalists and the first to document the unique wildlife of the Alaskan coast. In the course of the voyage, Steller made his valuable discoveries and suffered, along with Bering and the cred of the ill-fated brig St. Peter, some of the most grueling experiences in the history of Arctic exploration. First published in 1966, Where the Sea Breaks Its Back was hailed as "among this country's greatest outdoor writing" by Field & Stream magazine, and today continues to enchant and enlighten the new generations of readers about this amazing and yet tragic expedition, and Georg Steller's significant discoveries as an early naturalist.
This is a little known story of WWII in which two American planes crash in Greenland and the Coast Guard is determined to retrieve the men, whether dead or alive. Then the rescue plane disappears. A harrowing tale that reveals that it doesn't have to be hot to be in a hell on earth.Frozen in Time
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Mitchell ZuckoffSynopsis:
Two harrowing crashes . . . A vanished rescue plane . . . A desperate fight for life in a frozen, hostile land . . . The quest to solve a seventy-year-old mystery
The author of the smash New York Times bestseller Lost in Shangri-La delivers a gripping true story of endurance, bravery, ingenuity, and honor set in the vast Arctic wilderness of World War II and today.
On November 5, 1942, a U.S. cargo plane on a routine flight slammed into the Greenland ice cap. Four days later, a B-17 on the search-and-rescue mission became lost in a blinding storm and also crashed. Miraculously, all nine men on the B-17 survived. The U.S. military launched a second daring rescue operation, but the Grumman Duck amphibious plane sent to find the men flew into a severe storm and vanished.
In this thrilling adventure, Mitchell Zuckoff offers a spellbinding account of these harrowing disasters and the fate of the survivors and their would-be saviors. Frozen in Time places us at the center of a group of valiant airmen fighting to stay alive through 148 days of a brutal Arctic winter by sheltering from subzero temperatures and vicious blizzards in the tail section of the broken B-17 until an expedition headed by famed Arctic explorer Bernt Balchen attempts to bring them to safety.
But that is only part of the story that unfolds in Frozen in Time. In present-day Greenland, Zuckoff joins the U.S. Coast Guard and North South Polar—a company led by the indefatigable dreamer Lou Sapienza, who worked for years to solve the mystery of the Duck’s last flight—on a dangerous expedition to recover the remains of the lost plane’s crew.
Drawing on intensive research and Zuckoff ’s firsthand account of the dramatic 2012 expedition, Frozen in Time is a breathtaking blend of mystery, adventure, heroism, and survival. It is also a poignant reminder of the sacrifices of our military personnel and their families—and a tribute to the important, perilous, and often-overlooked work of the U.S. Coast Guard.
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Russell M. LawsonSynopsis:
By age thirty-four Captain John Smith was already a well-known adventurer and explorer. He had fought as a mercenary in the religious wars of Europe and had won renown for fighting the Turks. He was most famous as the leader of the Virginia Colony at Jamestown, where he had wrangled with the powerful Powhatan and secured the help of Pocahontas. By 1614 he was seeking new adventures. He found them on the 7,000 miles of jagged coastline of what was variously called Norumbega, North Virginia, or Cannada, but which Smith named New England. This land had been previously explored by the English, but while they had made observations and maps and interacted with the native inhabitants, Smith found that “the Coast is . . . even as a Coast unknowne and undiscovered.” The maps of the region, such as they were, were inaccurate. On a long, painstaking excursion along the coast in a shallop, accompanied by sailors and the Indian guide Squanto, Smith took careful compass readings and made ocean soundings. His Description of New England, published in 1616, which included a detailed map, became the standard for many years, the one used by such subsequent voyagers as the Pilgrims when they came to Plymouth in 1620.
The Sea Mark is the first narrative history of Smith’s voyage of exploration, and it recounts Smith’s last years when, desperate to return to New England to start a commercial fishery, he languished in Britain, unable to persuade his backers to exploit the bounty he had seen there.
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Release date: February 9, 2016
Jungle of Stone: The Extraordinary Journey of John L. Stephens and Frederick Catherwood
by William Carlsen no photo)Synopsis:
The extraordinary true story of the rediscovery of the Mayan civilization: In the tradition of The Lost City of Z and Empire of Ice, comes the forgotten tale of 19th century American John Lloyd Stephens’s quest to uncover and understand the ancient world’s most advanced civilization amid the jungles of Central America.
Imagine The Lost City of Z, except the fabled lost jungle civilization really was found—an “Egypt in the Americas” in which 1,500-year-old pyramids and temples were hidden in impenetrable tropical forests, along with evidence of astonishingly sophisticated art, writing, science, and culture.
In 1839, when John Lloyd Stephens, a dashing U.S. special ambassador to Central America, and Frederick Catherwood, an acclaimed British architect and draftsman, set out into the unexplored jungles of the Yucatan, Charles Darwin was aboard the H.M.S. Beagle, the Bible was the basic template of history, and most people believed the world was less than 6,000 years old. Deep in the jungles, they stumbled upon the wondrous ruins of the Mayan civilization—an astonishing find that would change western understanding of human history.
In Jungle of Stone, William Carlsen uncovers the rich history of the ruins as he follows Stephens and Catherwood’s journey through present day Guatemala, Honduras, and Mexico. Drawing upon Stephens’s journals and Cather’s magnificent illustrations—which became the bestselling book Incidents of Travel in Yucatan—Carlsen artfully tells the enthralling story of two great voyagers and the world they discovered.
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Release date: February 2, 2016
White Eskimo: The Incredible Journeys and Timeless Stories of Knud Rasmussen
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Stephen R. BownSynopsis:
Among the explorers made famous for revealing hitherto impenetrable cultures—T. E. Lawrence and Wilfred Thesiger in the Middle East, Richard Burton in Africa—Knud Rasmussen stands out not only for his physical bravery but also for the beauty of his writing. Part Danish, part Inuit, Rasmussen made a courageous three-year journey by dog sled from Greenland to Alaska to reveal the common origins of all circumpolar peoples. Lovers of Arctic adventure, exotic cultures, and timeless legend will relish this gripping tale by Stephen R. Bown, known as "Canada’s Simon Winchester."
I ran across this wonderful picture of the famous Antarctic explorer Sir Ernest Shakleton and thought it needed to be shared.
(Source: National Geographic)
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Release date: May 6, 2016
The Greatest Show in the Arctic: The American Exploration of Franz Josef Land, 1898–1905
by P. J. Capelotti (no photo)Synopsis:
In Gilded Age America, Arctic explorers were fabulous celebrities—assured of riches and near-immortality so long as they reached the North Pole first. Of the many attempts to meet that goal, three American expeditions, launched from the Russian archipelago of Franz Josef Land, ended in abject failure, their exploits consigned to near-oblivion. Even so, these ventures—the Wellman expedition (1898–99), the Baldwin-Ziegler (1901–2), and the Fiala-Ziegler (1903–5)—have much to tell us about the personalities, politics, and economics of exploration in their day. In The Greatest Show in the Arctic, the first book to chronicle all three expeditions, P. J. Capelotti explores what went right and what, in the end, went tragically wrong.
The cast of colorful characters from the Franz Josef Land forays included Walter Wellman, a Chicago journalist and bon vivant running from debts, his mistress, and an illegitimate daughter; Evelyn Briggs Baldwin, a deranged meteorologist with a fetish for balloons and a passion for Swedish conserves; and Anthony Fiala, a pious photographer in search of God in the Arctic. Featuring an international cast of supporting characters worthy of a three-ring circus, The Greatest Show in the Arctic follows each of the three expeditions in turn, from spectacular feats of financing to their bitter ends. Along the way, the explorers accumulated considerable geographic knowledge and left a legacy of place-names.
Through close study of the expeditions’ journals, Capelotti reveals that the Franz Josef Land endeavors foundered chiefly because of poor leadership and internal friction, not for lack of funding, as historians have previously suspected. Presenting tales of noble intentions, novel inventions, and epic miscalculations, The Greatest Show in the Arctic brings fresh life to a unique and underappreciated story of American exploration.
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Release date: November 1, 2016
A Wretched and Precarious Situation: In Search of the Last Arctic Frontier
by David Welky (no photo)Synopsis:
In 1906, from atop a snow-swept hill in the ice fields northwest of Greenland, Commander Robert E. Peary spotted a heretofore unknown land looming in the distance. He called it “Crocker Land.” Scientists and explorers agreed that Peary had found a new continent. Several years later, two of Peary’s disciples, George Borup and Donald MacMillan―with the sponsorship of the American Museum of Natural History―assembled a team of amateurs to investigate. They pitched their two-year mission as a scientific tour de force that would fill in the last blank space on the globe. Instead, the Crocker Land Expedition became a five-year ordeal that endured Arctic blizzards, dwindling supplies, a fatal boating accident, a drunken sea captain, a shipwreck, marooned rescue parties, disease, dissension, and a crewman-turned-murderer. Based on a trove of unpublished letters, diaries, and field notes, A Wretched and Precarious Situation is a harrowing Arctic adventure unlike any other.
My two favorite books on exploration are perhaps a little abstract when considering some of the other recommendations I've come across in this discussion. These two are about explorers who inspired other explorers, and while they are largely forgotten, their impact is so profound I feel they should be revitalized. 
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Andrea WulfThe Invention of Nature is a biography of the forgotten Alexander von Humboldt, the naturalist and explorer who inspired Charles Darwin, Henry David Thoreau, and John Muir among many others. This book was incredibly interesting to me as Humboldt's life, from Europe to South America to Aisa, intersects with many important historical figures and his work Kosmos, influenced almost the entire world. A really well researched and fascinating read.
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Giles MiltonGiles Milton, in this book, traces the path of Sir John Mandeville, perhaps one of the very first European explorers. Mandeville, was largely debunked as a fraud for his fantastical lies in the second half of his widely popular travel memoir (that inspired explorers like Columbus and Marco Polo among others), but Milton looks closer and points out the rays of truth that are woven into his tales and travels. This book is more an excellent piece of investigative history (to me) than biography. It is engaging and surprising and inspired my own travels in Turkey. So I highly recommend it.
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Let me show you the first one:
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Andrea WulfDo the same thing for the second - you have all of the parts except for typing the word by and adding that and taking out the comma
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Release date: September 12, 2017
Dead Reckoning: The Untold Story of the Northwest Passage
by Ken McGoogan (no photo)Synopsis:
With this book—his most ambitious yet—Ken McGoogan delivers a vivid, comprehensive recasting of Arctic-exploration history. Dead Reckoning challenges the conventional narrative, which emerged out of Victorian England and focused almost exclusively on Royal Navy officers. By integrating non-British and fur-trade explorers and, above all, Canada’s indigenous peoples, this work brings the story of Arctic discovery into the twenty-first century.
Orthodox history celebrates such naval figures as John Franklin, Edward Parry and James Clark Ross. Dead Reckoning tells their stories, but the book also encompasses such forgotten heroes as Thanadelthur, Akaitcho, Tattanoeuck, Ouligbuck, Tookoolito and Ebierbing, to name just a few. Without the assistance of the Inuit, Franklin’s recently discovered ships, Erebus and Terror, would still be lying undiscovered at the bottom of the polar sea.
The book ranges from the sixteenth century to the present day, looks at climate change and the politics of the Northwest Passage, and recognizes the cultural diversity of a centuries-old quest. Informed by the author’s own voyages and researches in the Arctic, and illustrated throughout, Dead Reckoning is a colourful, multi-dimensional saga that demolishes myths, exposes pretenders and celebrates unsung heroes. For international readers, it sets out a new story of Arctic discovery. For Canadians, it brings that story home.
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Five ships Sailed out with Ferdinand Magellan and only one returned to Spain (minus Magellan) to complete the first circumnavigation of the world. (That doesn't count the one ship that mutinied and returned to Spain long before the fleet even saw the Pacific Ocean.) A lot of research went into this book and the author makes excellent use of primary sources, including logs and diaries that survived this epic journey. And yet, for the sake of drama, perhaps, he insists on repeating an old myth. It's even evident in the very title of the book. He cites the sailors' fear of sailing off the edge of the world. People knew the world was a sphere long - LONG - before Magellan's voyage. They may have been seeking an unknown route and there were dangers aplenty and very good reasons to be fearful, but sailing over the edge of the world was not one of them.
But the book is still worth reading if you're interested in this "age of discovery." Among other things, it gives us a much more intimate glimpse of Magellan's personality and the day-to-day travails of sailing on relatively primitive ships at a time when they still didn't know what caused scurvy.
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Laurence Bergreen
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Release date: March 13, 2018
To the Edges of the Earth: 1909, the Race for the Three Poles, and the Climax of the Age of Exploration
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Edward J. LarsonSynopsis:
In the spirit of bestselling adventure narratives In the Kingdom of Ice, In the Heart of the Sea, and The Lost City of Z, Pulitzer Prize–winning historian Edward J. Larson's To the Edges of the Earth brings to life the climax of the age of exploration: in the year 1909 expeditions to the Arctic, Antarctica, and Himalaya pushed human accomplishment to the extremes and set records for altitude and the farthest north and south.
In 1909, three daring expeditions pushed to the edges of the globe, bringing within reach, for the first time, a complete accounting of all the earth’s surface. In January, Douglas Mawson, as part of Ernest Shackleton’s Nimrod Expedition to Antarctica, became the first man to reach the South Magnetic Pole. Soon after, Shackleton himself set a new farthest south record in pursuit of the Geographic South Pole. In April, American Robert Peary, with Matthew Henson, claimed to be the first to reach the North Pole. And in the Himalayas—the so-called "Third Pole," the pole of altitude— a team led by legendary mountaineer and dashing Italian Prince Luigi Amedeo, the Duke of Abruzzi, reached 24,600 feet, setting a world altitude record that would stand for a generation.
Drawing on both archival and on-the-ground research (he lived for two weeks in Shackleton's Antarctic hut), Larson interweaves the stories of these three expeditions into one dazzling adventure narrative that illuminates the spirit of the age.
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To the Ends of the Earth: The Truth Behind the Glory of Polar Exploration
by John V. H. Dippel (no photo)Synopsis:
From the late-17th to the early 20th century, intrepid explorers from America and Europe risked (and sometimes lost) their lives exploring the forbidding, uncharted landscapes of the Arctic and Antarctica. What drove these men to undertake these seemingly impossible journeys? In this deeply researched book, author John Dippel makes a convincing case that dozens of polar expeditions were motivated less by courageous idealism than personal ambition and national interests.
The author traces the ways in which men of unbridled ambition responded to society's need for heroes by masking their true intentions behind patriotic sentiments or noble claims about advancing science. In so doing they frequently put their own lives and those of the men in their command at enormous risk. At the same time, they projected an attitude of cultural superiority, looking down on indigenous arctic people as "savages." This disrespect and ignorance of native means of transportation, diet, shelter, and knowledge of the terrain often led explorers into disaster, where men perished from starvation and exposure or nearly lost their minds. In the end, the failure of so many polar expeditions exposed the limits of humanity's control of nature and helped to undermine faith in inevitable progress. As Dippel notes, this new consciousness has continued to influence our thinking in the present day.
Readers who have heard of the incredible exploits of such famous explorers as Robert F. Scott, Roald Amundsen, James Cook, and Robert Peary will find in this book an intriguing explanation for what impelled these men to endure unimaginable cold, near-starvation, and years of isolation at the ends of the earth.
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Barry LopezSynopsis:
Barry Lopez's National Book Award-winning classic study of the Far North is widely considered his masterpiece.
Lopez offers a thorough examination of this obscure world-its terrain, its wildlife, its history of Eskimo natives and intrepid explorers who have arrived on their icy shores.
But what turns this marvelous work of natural history into a breathtaking study of profound originality is his unique meditation on how the landscape can shape our imagination, desires, and dreams. Its prose as hauntingly pure as the land it describes,
Arctic Dreams is nothing less than an indelible classic of modern literature.
Awards:
National Book Award for Nonfiction (1986), Oregon Book Award for Nonfiction (1987), National Book Critics Circle Award Nominee for General Nonfiction (1986)
Review:
Robert Macfarlane, author of an acclaimed trilogy of books about landscape and human thought reviews some of his favourite books of nature-writing with FiveBooks
You have described Lopez as one of the most important writers about wilderness. Please tell us about Arctic Dreams.
This book changed my life and really made me become a writer, if any one book did. I remember finding a very battered secondhand copy of it in a bookshop in Vancouver while I was out climbing in the Rockies, in my early twenties.
Put most simply, the book is an account of the Arctic’s anthropological, cultural and natural histories. But it’s also, like all the books on my list, an investigation into how we imagine place, and the more complicated question of how place imagines us – how we are brought to think in certain ways by certain landscapes. It was a bestseller in the 1980s in America, and is still a legendary book for many people. It was part of a surge of extraordinary writing about landscape that occurred in America between the late 1970s and early 1990s.
Lopez is as at ease in explaining the migration paths of narwhals or the spiritual history of early Celtic Christianity as he is with writing in the pristine moment. That combination of an etched sharpness to his imagery – it’s modernist prose-poetry really – with a deep knowledge born of reading and being out in the environment, was utterly inspiring to me. I saw that non-fiction could be as creative and beautiful as any fiction.
Lopez spent five years in the Canadian Arctic as a biologist. How does he make a book about the tundra and miles of snow and ice engaging for the reader?
This is one of the big problems with landscape writing – landscape doesn’t really do plots and it doesn’t really do suspense.
Lopez keeps us reading largely through style. He changes focus a great deal. He moves around in time. Time will suddenly deepen – an arrowhead found on the tundra will lead him back into pre-history, and from pre-history we will race forwards to the instant of a caribou seen across open ground, or a whale surfacing, or a bird of prey stooping. I find that rapidity and variety of movement in time and across space exhilarating.
Momentum in Lopez’s work is all about the quality of the writing and thinking. There’s an extraordinary chapter which he begins by standing at a point on the shore where the total tidal range is about an inch. He stands there for hours, while the tide comes in its full inch and then recedes. Only Lopez could make page-turning prose out of that incident.
He said that the defining quality of the wilderness is that it draws attention to the “narrow impetuosity” of our human schedules. Are writers about the wild driven solely by their fascination with the natural world, or also by misanthropy?
That’s a very good question, and an important one to ask of any book about nature – how deep is its green? When Lopez is talking about narrow impetuosity of human schedules, he is talking about a hectic, Western, late-modern, capitalist time.
He’s not talking about the kinds of time experienced and practiced by some of the native inhabitants of the region. Unlike John Muir, one of the founding fathers of the American conservation movement, Lopez is alert to the people who have lived and continue to live in these landscapes.
He doesn’t write them out at all, though there are books which do. He’s suspicious of certain ways of being human, and very approving of others."
More:
https://fivebooks.com/best-books/robe...
Source: FiveBooks
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Synopsis:
Robert Macfarlane's Mountains of the Mind is the most interesting of the crop of books published to mark the 50th anniversary of the first successful ascent of Everest.
Macfarlane is both a mountaineer and a scholar. Consequently we get more than just a chronicle of climbs. He interweaves accounts of his own adventurous ascents with those of pioneers such as George Mallory, and in with an erudite discussion of how mountains became such a preoccupation for the modern western imagination.
The book is organised around a series of features of mountaineering--glaciers, summits, unknown ranges--and each chapter explores the scientific, artistic and cultural discoveries and fashions that accompanied exploration.
The contributions of assorted geologists, romantic poets, landscape artists, entrepreneurs, gallant amateurs and military cartographers are described with perceptive clarity.
The book climaxes with an account of Mallory's fateful ascent on Everest in 1924, one of the most famous instances of an obsessive pursuit. Macfarlane is well-placed to describe it since it is one he shares.
MacFarlane's own stories of perilous treks and assaults in the Alps, the Cairngorms and the Tian Shan mountains between China and Kazakhstan are compelling.
Readers who enjoyed Francis Spufford's masterly I May Be Some Time: Ice and the English Imagination will enjoy Mountains of the Mind. This is a slighter volume than Spufford's and it loses in depth what it gains in range, but for an insight into the moody, male world of mountaineering past and present it is invaluable. --Miles Taylor
Awards:
Guardian First Book Award (2003), Somerset Maugham Award (2004), Boardman Tasker Prize Nominee for Mountain Literature (2003), Sunday Times/Peters Fraser + Dunlop Young Writer of the Year Award (2004)
Review:
Robert MacFarlane being interviewed by FiveBooks:
The underlying narrative of much landscape writing is man’s relationship and interaction with the natural world.
There are many versions of that question or preoccupation. Some of the books I have chosen are about connection with nature, and some are about its terrifying disinterest. The wilderness can be a very welcoming and miraculous place, but it can also be fatal in its complete indifference to human presence. The wild – that extreme manifestation of nature – is both exhilarating and, sometimes, murderous.
Your most recent book The Old Ways touches on this question of the connection of between man and landscape, doesn’t it?
Yes it does. I have written three books which together form a loose trilogy about landscape and human thought. The first, Mountains of the Mind, was about why people might be willing to lose limbs or even life for their love of mountains – which are, after all, nothing but geological structures
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Edward AbbeySynopsis:
"A passionately felt, deeply poetic book. It has philosophy. It has humor. It has its share of nerve-tingling adventures...set down in a lean, racing prose, in a close-knit style of power and beauty."
THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW
Edward Abbey lived for three seasons in the desert at Moab, Utah, and what he discovered about the land before him, the world around him, and the heart that beat within, is a fascinating, sometimes raucous, always personal account of a place that has already disappeared, but is worth remembering and living through again and again.
Review:
Robert Macfarlane, author of an acclaimed trilogy of books about landscape and human thought talks about this book with FiveBooks:
"Tell us about your final pick.
I chose it partly to juxtapose with Shepherd. Abbey is grumpy, misanthropic, abrasive, bracing. He acknowledges the landscape’s hostility and its challenges, and accepts them as kinds of fierce instruction – desert as moral boot-camp. He’s a rightful legend in American literature, and his other great desert work is The Monkey Wrench Gang, a novel which arguably inspired the founding of the eco-activist group Earth First.
Abbey is full of passion, fury and contempt. He’s about as far from Lopez’s calm, priest-like reverence and discretion as you could imagine. I wanted to end my list with a book by a pugilist – a fiery fighter to shake up the sometimes over-tranquil atmosphere of nature writing.
Can you tell us more about Desert Solitaire and what he is so angry about?
Abbey is angry about the development of the desert, and about late-modernity more generally. The book describes the classic American retreat narrative. He goes and lives in Arches National Park, ostensibly to work as a park ranger, but really to think hard about the desert and about humanity. The desert, and his caravan there, offers a vantage point from which he can watch and witness human futility in action. He explores the canyon-lands of the area, and he drinks and thinks and speculates about stars and snakes, sand, and the disinterested, exhilarating nature of the wild."
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Source: FiveBooks
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Hampton SidesSynopsis:
New York Times bestselling author Hampton Sides returns with a white-knuckle tale of polar exploration and survival in the Gilded Age
In the late nineteenth century, people were obsessed by one of the last unmapped areas of the globe: the North Pole. No one knew what existed beyond the fortress of ice rimming the northern oceans, although theories abounded. The foremost cartographer in the world, a German named August Petermann, believed that warm currents sustained a verdant island at the top of the world. National glory would fall to whoever could plant his flag upon its shores.
James Gordon Bennett, the eccentric and stupendously wealthy owner of The New York Herald, had recently captured the world's attention by dispatching Stanley to Africa to find Dr. Livingstone. Now he was keen to re-create that sensation on an even more epic scale. So he funded an official U.S. naval expedition to reach the Pole, choosing as its captain a young officer named George Washington De Long, who had gained fame for a rescue operation off the coast of Greenland. De Long led a team of 32 men deep into uncharted Arctic waters, carrying the aspirations of a young country burning to become a world power. On July 8, 1879, the USS Jeannette set sail from San Francisco to cheering crowds in the grip of "Arctic Fever."
The ship sailed into uncharted seas, but soon was trapped in pack ice. Two years into the harrowing voyage, the hull was breached. Amid the rush of water and the shrieks of breaking wooden boards, the crew abandoned the ship. Less than an hour later, the Jeannette sank to the bottom,and the men found themselves marooned a thousand miles north of Siberia with only the barest supplies. Thus began their long march across the endless ice—a frozen hell in the most lonesome corner of the world. Facing everything from snow blindness and polar bears to ferocious storms and frosty labyrinths, the expedition battled madness and starvation as they desperately strove for survival.
With twists and turns worthy of a thriller, In The Kingdom of Ice is a spellbinding tale of heroism and determination in the most unforgiving territory on Earth.
LITERARY AWARDS:
Andrew Carnegie Medal Nominee for Nonfiction (2015), Goodreads Choice Award Nominee for History & Biography (2014)
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This is live coverage of Saturday's SpaceX NASA Falcon 9 launch, scheduled for 2:22 p.m. Houston time. NASA astronauts Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley were scheduled for liftoff aboard a SpaceX Crew Dragon spacecraft. This was the second attempt for liftoff.
Link: https://youtu.be/ThOqtaHGAVw
Coverage starts around 1:59:53 so go to that location.
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https://www.clickorlando.com/news/loc...
https://www.ketv.com/article/spacex-l...#
NASA Astronauts Arrive at the International Space Station on SpaceX Spacecraft
After a successful launch into orbit yesterday, SpaceX’s Dragon Endeavour spacecraft is en route to dock with the International Space Station. Watch as astronauts Robert Behnken and Douglas Hurley join the crew aboard our orbiting laboratory:
Link: https://youtu.be/pyNl87mXOkc
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Release date: February 23, 2021
The Great Ages of Discovery: How Western Civilization Learned About a Wider World
by Stephen J Pyne (no photo)Synopsis:
For more than 600 years, Western civilization has relied on exploration to learn about a wider world and universe. The Great Ages of Discovery details the different eras of Western exploration in terms of its locations, its intellectual contexts, the characteristic moral conflicts that underwrote encounters, and the grand gestures that distill an age into its essence.
Historian and MacArthur Fellow Stephen J. Pyne identifies three great ages of discovery in his fascinating new book. The first age of discovery ranged from the early 15th to the early 18th century, sketched out the contours of the globe, aligned with the Renaissance, and had for its grandest expression the circumnavigation of the world ocean. The second age launched in the latter half of the 18th century, spanning into the early 20th century, carrying the Enlightenment along with it, pairing especially with settler societies, and had as its prize achievement the crossing of a continent. The third age began after World War II, and, pivoting from Antarctica, pushed into the deep oceans and interplanetary space. Its grand gesture is Voyager’s passage across the solar system. Each age had in common a galvanic rivalry: Spain and Portugal in the first age, Britain and France—followed by others—in the second, and the USSR and USA in the third.
With a deep and passionate knowledge of the history of Western exploration, Pyne takes us on a journey across hundreds of years of geographic trekking. The Great Ages of Discovery is an interpretive companion to what became Western civilization’s quest narrative, with the triumphs and tragedies that grand journey brought, the legacies of which are still very much with us.
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Release date: May 17, 2022
River of the Gods: Sir Richard Burton, Sidi Mubarak Bombay, John Hanning Speke, and the Epic Search for the Source of the Nile
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Candice MillardSynopsis:
The Nile River is the longest in the world. Its fertile floodplain allowed for rise to the great civilization of ancient Egypt, but for millennia the location of its headwaters was shrouded in mystery. Pharaonic and Roman attempts to find it were stymied by a giant labyrinthine swamp, and subsequent expeditions got no further. In the 19th century, the discovery and translation of the Rosetta Stone set off a frenzy of interest in ancient Egypt. At the same time, European powers sent off waves of explorations intended to map the unknown corners of the globe - and extend their colonial empires.
Two British men - Richard Burton and John Hanning Speke - were sent by the Royal Geographical Society to claim the prize for England. Burton was already famous for being the first non-Muslim to travel to Mecca, disguised as an Arab chieftain. He spoke twenty-nine languages, was a decorated soldier, and literally wrote the book on sword-fighting techniques for the British Army. He was also mercurial, subtle, and an iconoclastic atheist. Speke was a young aristocrat and Army officer determined to make his mark, passionate about hunting, Burton's opposite in temperament and beliefs.
From the start the two men clashed, Speke chafing under Burton's command and Burton disapproving of Speke's ignorance of the people whose lands through which they traveled. They would endure tremendous hardships, illness, and constant setbacks. Two years in, deep in the African interior, Burton became too sick to press on, but Speke did, and claimed he found the source in a great lake that he christened Lake Victoria. When they returned to England, Speke rushed to take credit, disparaging Burton. Burton disputed his claim, and Speke launched another expedition to Africa to prove it. The two became venomous enemies, with the public siding with the more charismatic Burton, to Speke's great envy. The day before they were to publicly debate, Speke shot himself.
Yet there was a third man on both expeditions, his name obscured by imperial annals, whose exploits were even more extraordinary. This was Sidi Mubarak Bombay, who was enslaved and shipped from his home village in East Africa to India. When the man who purchased him died, he made his way into the local Sultan's army, and eventually traveled back to Africa, where he used his resourcefulness, linguistic prowess and raw courage to forge a living as a guide. Without his talents, it is likely that neither Englishman would have come close to the headwaters of the Nile, or perhaps even survived.
In River of the Gods Candice Millard has written another peerless story of courage and adventure, set against the backdrop of the race to exploit Africa by the colonial powers.
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Release date: June 4, 2024
The Explorers: A New History of America in Ten Expeditions
by Amanda BellowsSynopsis:
The archetype of the American explorer, a rugged white man, has dominated our popular culture since the late eighteenth century, when Daniel Boone’s autobiography captivated readers with tales of treacherous journeys. But our commonly held ideas about American exploration do not tell the whole story—far from it.
The Explorers rediscovers a diverse group of Americans who went to the western frontier and beyond, traversing the farthest reaches of the globe and even penetrating outer space in their endeavor to find the unknown. Many escaped from lives circumscribed by racism, sexism, poverty, and discrimination as they took on great risk in unfamiliar territory. Born into slavery, James Beckwourth found freedom as a mountain man and became one of the great entrepreneurs of Gold Rush California. Matthew Henson, the son of African American sharecroppers, left rural Maryland behind to seek the North Pole. Women like Harriet Chalmers Adams ascended Peruvian mountains to gain geographic knowledge while Amelia Earhart and Sally Ride shattered glass ceilings by pushing the limits of flight.
In The Explorers, readers will travel across the vast Great Plains and into the heights of the Sierra Nevada mountains; they will traverse the frozen Arctic Ocean and descend into the jungles of South America; they will journey by canoe and horseback, train and dogsled, airplane and space shuttle. Readers will experience the exhilarating history of American exploration alongside the men and women who shared a deep drive to discover the unknown.
Across two centuries and many thousands of miles of terrain, Amanda Bellows offers an ode to our country’s most intrepid adventurers—and reveals the history of America in the process.
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Release date: January 8, 2026
Extraordinary Expeditions: The People and Journeys That Changed History
by Anne Della Guardia (no photo)Synopsis:
Extraordinary Expeditions highlights more than 30 of the most influential expeditions in history. While some will likely be familiar to readers, such as Christopher Columbus's journey to the New World or Charles Darwin's travels in the Galapagos Islands that inspired his theory of natural selection, others are less well-known but no less important. The book examines a diverse array of expeditions, spanning almost 2,000 years and including all seven continents and beyond. Care has been taken to include journeys conducted by women, people of color, and non-Westerners in order to provide a more comprehensive and inclusive volume.
The profiled expeditions are organized chronologically, although a geographical entry list ensures readers interested in a specific region can quickly find relevant material. Each entry includes a description of the expedition, as well as an analysis of its historical context and lasting impact. Maps allow readers to trace the paths of these expeditions, while a collection of primary documents offers valuable insights from those embarking on these journeys.
History's greatest expeditions have been prompted by many motivations, from a love of adventure to a desire for fame, from the promise of economic prosperity to a thirst for scientific knowledge. Regardless of why it was undertaken, each of these expeditions had significant impact that endured long after the adventure was over.
Wow, Jerome, you’ve been reading some great books! Thanks for alerting us to them.Regards,
Andrea
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Release date: April 21, 2026
This Vast Enterprise: A New History of Lewis & Clark
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Craig FehrmanSynopsis:
Celebrated young historian Craig Fehrman, whose first book, Author in Chief, was hailed by Thomas Mallon in The Wall Street Journal as "one of the best books on the American presidency to appear in recent years,"delivers a major new account of the Lewis and Clark expedition.
When Meriwether Lewis and William Clark returned from their long journey, in 1806, they brought an incredible tale starring themselves as courageous explorers, skilled scientists, and peaceful ambassadors. There was truth in those descriptions. But there was also distortion.
For the first time in a generation, This Vast Enterprise offers a fresh and more accurate account of their expedition--a gripping narrative that draws on new documents, stunning analysis, and Native perspectives. Fehrman's central insight is that the success of Lewis and Clark depended on much more than just Lewis and Clark. We all know Sacajawea, and some of us know York, the Black man Clark enslaved. But This Vast Enterprise introduces us to John Ordway, a working-class soldier who fought grizzlies and towed the captains' bulky barge. It introduces us to Wolf Calf, a Blackfoot teenager who watched his friend die in a battle with Lewis and his men.
To capture this cast of characters, each chapter in This Vast Enterprise moves to a new point of view, describing that person's desires and contradictions with an unprecedented level of care. Fehrman balances the story's inherent adventure with the humanity of its protagonists. One chapter shows Thomas Jefferson operating in an age of bitter partisan unrest--his secret maneuvers to fund the expedition, uncovered here for the first time, are a case study in presidential power. Another chapter reveals the strategy and strength of Black Buffalo, a Lakota leader, completely upending our understanding of early Lakota American diplomacy. In his chapters, Clark is not a bad speller but a student of the Enlightenment. (Fehrman found Clark's college notebook.) Lewis is someone whose psychological demons feel at once heartbreaking and modern.
And yet, in the end, the captains are men who needed help--from Sacajawea, from York, and from each other. Their expeditiontruly was a vast enterprise, a sprawling and federally funded military mission that came down to the heroic sacrifices of a few human beings. This book portrays those people, all of them, for the first time. It is more than just a work of history--it's a testament to the power of innovative research and emotional storytelling, and a thrilling reminder that even the most familiar moments in history can still surprise us.
The History Book Club
Books mentioned in this topic
This Vast Enterprise: A New History of Lewis & Clark (other topics)Extraordinary Expeditions: The People and Journeys That Changed History (other topics)
The Explorers: A New History of America in Ten Expeditions (other topics)
River of the Gods: Genius, Courage and Betrayal in the Search for the Source of the Nile (other topics)
The Great Ages of Discovery: How Western Civilization Learned About a Wider World (other topics)
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Authors mentioned in this topic
Craig Fehrman (other topics)Anne Della Guardia (other topics)
Amanda Bellows (other topics)
Candice Millard (other topics)
Stephen J. Pyne (other topics)
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Synopsis:
Vitus Jonassen Bering (1681-1741) is a towering figure in the history of exploration. In the course of two expeditions that consumed most of his adult life - and eventually led to his death - he journeyed from St Petersburg to Siberia and ultimately to the northwest coast of America. Along with the members of his expedition (thousands participated in the second expedition), Bering greatly expanded the Russian empire, pioneered the geography of the North Pacific Ocean, and laid the groundwork for Russian trade and settlement in the American West. In this biography of Bering, Orcutt Frost chronicles the life of this extraordinary explorer. Drawing on a wide range of new evidence - including personal letters and archaeological evidence derived from the discovery of Bering's grave site - the author reconstructs Bering's personality, his perilous voyages and his uneasy relationship with the naturalist Georg Steller, who unobtrusively guided the stranded expedition as Bering lay dying.