![]() A little older, but still underrated, is Alone on the Ice, by the late David Roberts-think Touching the Void but set in 1913 Antarctica. ![]() The last decade alone has seen the publication of a flurry of books about lesser known expeditions to the poles: Andrea Pitzer’s Icebound tells the story of a 16th-century voyage to the high Russian Arctic that became a yearlong battle for survival, while In the Kingdom of Ice, from Outside alum Hampton Sides, and Madhouse at the End of the Earth, by Julian Sancton, both New York Times bestsellers, recount tragically unsuccessful 19th-century attempts at being the first to the North and South Poles, respectively. Luckily for those of us who are fired up about the discovery of the Endurance shipwreck, there is plenty to read and watch to slake our thirst for polar adventure and suffering. ![]() I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised that the book was in high demand. Ernest Shackleton’s sunken ship, Endurance, had just been located 10,000 feet down on the floor of the Weddell Sea, and Lansing’s classic is the definitive tale of of the extraordinary events that followed the 1915 sinking: Shackleton and his crew, over the course of two years, fought their way through Antarctica and made it back home. But this time, every copy of Endurance was already checked out. I live in the Yukon, in northern Canada, and usually when I search for a decades-old book in the library’s extensive Arctic and Antarctic collections, I find what I need. The other day I searched for Alfred Lansing’s 1959 book Endurance in my local library’s database. ![]()
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