Product Description

Historian David Crane, with full access to the explorer’s papers, diaries, and expedition records, gives us an illuminating portrait of Robert Falcon Scott that is more nuanced and balanced than any we have had before.

In reassessing Scott’s life, Crane is able to provide a fresh perspective on not only the Discovery expedition of 1901—4 and the Terra Nova expedition of 1910—13, but his remarkable scientific achievements and the challenges of his tumultuous private life. Neither foolhardy dilettante, nor the last romantic champion of his age, Scott is presented as a man of indomitable courage and questionable judgment. The result is an absolutely compelling portrait of a complicated hero.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #671041 in Books
• Published on: 2007-11-06
• Released on: 2007-11-06
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 608 pages

From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. If ever a man needed saving from the enthusiasm of his admirers," Crane begins, "it was Scott." But although this hefty biography strips away much of the legend and mystique surrounding the polar expeditions of Robert Falcon Scott, it's still infused with hero worship. In addition to his leadership skills, Crane claims Scott was the only polar explorer to possess significant literary talent, and his writings—especially the final message scrawled as he lay dying in the Antarctic wastelands—"extend our sense of what it is to be human." The twin centerpieces of Scott's story are, of course, his two expeditions to Antarctica, both of which are recreated here with meticulous detail. Crane understands, however, that Scott's accomplishments in the polar region were shaped by his earlier experiences in the Royal Navy; thus the narrative is equally strong in recounting how Scott was able to overcome fierce opposition to his leadership of the first trip and how the rivalry with former crewmate Ernest Shackleton spurred the second. "Personality and character went on playing a decisive role in polar exploration long after it had been relegated to the margins of other history," Crane writes, and for all the dramatic action, it is Scott the man who most captivates the author—and readers. 16 pages of photos, maps. (Nov. 15)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist
Robert Falcon Scott and his four companions died from hunger and cold in 1912; they had reached the South Pole on January 18, only to discover that the Norwegian Amundsen had beaten them there a month earlier. The confirmation of Scott's death was met by an outpouring of public grief in Britain; he was quickly elevated to the status of an imperial martyr, on the level of Wolfe, Nelson, and Gordon. But in subsequent decades, journalists and biographers painted Scott as a self-absorbed, rash blunderer whose hubris led to the needless death of himself and his men. Crane strives to present both the heroic and less-admirable aspects of Scott's public career. He also provides interesting glimpses of the turmoil in Scott's private life. It is Scott's accomplishments and failures as an explorer that make his life so compelling, and Crane's story is at its best when he uses Scott's letters and diaries to describe the Antarctic expeditions. Here we see an enthralling, beautiful, but deadly landscape. This is a fair and often exciting saga of a still controversial figure. Jay Freeman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Review
“A compelling narrative drive. . . . It’s all here: Scott and his party lost on the featureless Antarctic plateau; Scott falling into a crater; frostbite, snow blindness, the unimaginable cold.”
—National Geographic

“Masterly. . . engrossing. . . . The most balanced biography [of Scott] yet. . . . Crane’s stylish prose is a sheer pleasure.”
—The New York Times Book Review

“A volume of its own epic proportions, using a historian’s depth and research perspective, leaving few stones unturned in pursuit of painting a thorough picture of the times and the intrigue and pressures of mounting such ventures.” —The Providence Journal

“Exhaustive. . . . [Crane] finds in Scott not a hapless adventurer but a hero for our times.”—Men’s Vogue

Customer Reviews

Captains Courageous
David Crane shows how the death of the explorer Captain Scott galvanized the UK on the edge of World War I, but he qualifies British response to the tragedy by pointing up that, despite the weight of popular opinion, the pre-war Edwardian years were not exactly the Golden Age of empire the way they are nowadays painted. Crane's life of Scott is in every way a re-revisionist biography, kicking against what he feels has been the unfair denigration of Scott's life and deeds over the past thirty years.

Sometimes this approach works, sometimes it doesn't. Through meticulous handling of evidence, he tells the story without a hint of strain, and yet sometimes whole paragraphs stop the action to argue that history has shafted Scott once again. A prototypical Englishman in the days when "God was an Englishman," Scott has suffered from unthinking backlhas, or so says Crane, and indeed he says it about four hundred times so that, frankly, I began to sympathize with Scott's attackers a bit, for no one's that perfect.

Indeed Crane admits as much, citing his rivalry with Shackleton and then finally with Amundsen as proof, but in each case, the other man is deeply at fault and Scott was just trying to muddle through on Naval smarts and years of experience leading men. It was a time for heroics, and something in the air (together with a thriving media culture) made heroes out of the most unlikely souls. England expected every man to do his duty, and alas so did Norway and Amundsen came home with the gold, so to speak, whereas the Englishmen after the same glittering prize were all dead by the time Amundsen returned home. "The Englishmen, the goal accompished," bleated the press, "lay quiet in the snows. Through the months since . . . while wives and friends set forth for meetings and counted time, they lay oblivious. All was over for them long ago."

Beyond the heroics of the era, Crane attributes the legend of Captain Scott to his indispitable skill as a prose writer. There is something macabre about the veneration given to his last journal, found by the relief party, but it's a bizarre twist totally understandable in the context, the words that live on after the hand that wrote them has grown cold and still. Without that last journal, its reinscription of subaltern heroics, its narrative of deprivation and memory and love, how else would Scott be remembered? In this regard Crane has an interesting passage about the way in which Westminster Abbey had its own little competition going on with St. Paul's Cathedral about which site had the most pomp and had the most heroes of empire commemmorated there.

Scoot of the Antartic, A life of courage
The book is dreadful. It continually refers to other expeditions that the average reader will not know about. The writing is random and its impossible to follow the thread. There are also many deliberate and irrelevant literary references just inserted to be clever. A great subject that I w\as looking forward to, treated very badly by a pseudo intellectual. Try as I might I could not finish it.

An Admiring View of a Complex Man
I particularily like the subtitle to this book, 'a life of courage and tragedy.'

Scott was undoubtedly courageous. He could not have been otherwise. On the other hand, his courage and drive to get to the South Pole was not exactly balanced by experience or perhaps by common sense. There's an old saying that if you wanted to get somewhere like the South Pole, Scott would have been a good leader to follow, but if you wanted to get back, then other expedition leaders like Shackleton would be your first choice. Shackleton's quotation: 'Better a live donkey than a dead lion.' Consistent with this, Scott got to the South Pole, Shackleton didn't. Scott didn't get back.

In this book, the author is clearly a deep admirer of Scott. And indeed he did great things. Coming from a humble beginning he appeared driven to accomplish things, and he did. He was a complicated man, and Mr. Crane's access to the family papers and Scott's letters give a view that is perhaps more balanced than what we have seen before.

If nothing else, Mr. Crane is an excellent writer and the story becomes one of those can't put down books.