Product Description

Veteran explorer Sir Ernest Shackleton’s excruciating and inspiring expedition to Antarctica aboard the Endurance has long captured the public imagination. South is his own first-hand account of this epic adventure.

As war clouds darkened over Europe in 1914, a party led by Shackleton set out to make the first crossing of the entire Antarctic continent via the Pole. But their initial optimism was short-lived as ice floes closed around their ship, gradually crushing it and marooning twenty-eight men on the polar ice. Alone in the world’s most unforgiving environment, Shackleton and his team began a brutal quest for survival. And as the story of their journey across treacherous seas and a wilderness of glaciers and snow fields unfolds, the scale of their courage and heroism becomes movingly clear.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #24822 in Books
• Published on: 2004-01-27
• Released on: 2004-01-27
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 416 pages

Review
"Best read in the course of a single stormy night... you will be gripped." -- The New Yorker

Review
“Best read in the course of a single stormy night... you will be gripped.” (The New Yorker)

About the Author
Ernest Shackleton (1874–1922) was a junior officer under Robert Falcon Scott during the 1901–1904 expedition to the South Pole. His expedition on the whaler Nimrod in 1907 earned him a knighthood.

Fergus Fleming is the author of Killing Dragons: The Conquest of the Alps, Ninety Degrees North: The Quest for the North Pole, and Barrow’s Boys.

Customer Reviews

Great account of adventure and survival in Antarctica.
This is one of the best survival/adventure stories that you will ever read. The events which take place during the Imperial Trans Antarctic Expedition of 1914-1917 are re-told by several different points of view and this gives the overall story a multi-faceted persona. The main re-telling of the story of the ENDURANCE is told primarily from Shackleton's point of view and re-affirmed through diary notes of his mates. His point of view is very straight-forward. He doesn't dwell on the painful and depressing conditions as you might expect but, seems to exude a strong, matter-of-fact leadership style which most likely gave his men strength in the face of such disastrous and dangerous conditions. Contrast his account of the ENDURANCE voyage with that of the AURORA which was originally planned to be the expedition's supply ship and you clearly see what I am talking about. The painful, weakened conditions of the AURORA men is agonizing to read...frostbite, scruvy, depression, fatigue, hunger, thirst, and the loss of 3 of their comrades. This is not implying that Shackleton never mentions the poor shape of his conditions or of his crew; it just seems that he doesn't dwell upon it however worried he may have been. Yet, we sense his concern for the failing health of some of his men and we share his pride when they are in fact rescued from Elephant Island and he watches them eat "proper" food for the first time in a very long time. In fact, one can hardly review this book without letting Shackleton, in his own words, describe the joy that found when they encountered when his small party found the whaling village at Stromness Bay, "We had pierced the veneer of outside things. We had "suffered, starved, and triumphed, groveled down yet grapsed at glory, grown bigger in the bigness of the whole."...We had reached the naked soul of men." This is truly one of the greatest adventure stories ever written.

South -- to the end.
My case of Shackleton Fever finally ended with this book -- the story of the doomed antarctic expedition as seen through the eyes of Shackleton himself. He emerges from these pages as an intelligent man who is modest about his achievements -- but not so modest as to blunt the excitement of his story. This book also gives many additional details of his attempts to rescue his men, and the often-overlooked story of the not-so-lucky supply expedition that awaited him on the far side of the antarctic ice pack. Perhaps the only fault of the book is that its careful narrative strips some of the mystery away from Shackleton's almost superhuman story. After reading 4 books on the subject, I find I still prefer Lancing's original version (see my review). But true Shackleton buffs won't rest easy until they have seen the original silent movie of the same name, including remarkable cinematography by Frank Hurley -- now available on videotape as a mesmerizing 90 minute movie from the dawn of motion pictures.

--Auralgo

hard to keep reading
It is tough to get through this book. Only the first half is about Shakleton's expedition. The rest amounts to a log of the Aurora crew that Shakleton relays second-hand.

The Endurance expedition, itself, is quite a piece of history, but the book does a poor job of showing this. The writing is dry. Killing dogs, penguins and seals is a regular thing. Location and weather are reported on almost every page. He does give a good sense of the cold, however and the food supplies.