The
Endurance
Caroline Alexander
Hardcover: 224 pages
Publisher: Knopf; 1st edition (November 3, 1998)
ISBN: 0375404031
Overall Rating: 5 Stars 
Readability: 5 Stars
Content: 5 Stars
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“Optimism is true moral courage.”
-E. Shackleton
The Endurance is a staggering story of survival, against all
odds, in the harshest environment on earth. In 1914, the legendary
polar explorer Earnest Shackleton led an expedition to Antarctica
intending to become the first man to cross the continent on foot.
But before Shackleton reached Antarctica his ship, The Endurance,
became trapped in pack ice. Trapped in the grip of the ice, Shackleton
and his crew are forced to spend the polar winter in their ship.
In the final throes of winter, the shifting pack ice crushes the
ship and the men abandon the boat. After several vain attempts
to reach land by foot, the men decide to camp on the ice until
it breaks up in spring. When the ice eventually breaks apart,
the men take to three small lifeboats, hoping to reach land. After
a harrowing seven days at sea, the men reach land, for the first
time in 497 days. Still 800 miles away from the nearest settlement,
Shackleton and five other men sail across the most treacherous
ocean on earth in a boat only 22 feet long. Reaching South Georgia
Island safely, the remaining men are eventually rescued, without
the loss of a single human life. The story of the Endurance is
engrossing and the writing superb. Alexander pulls extensively
from the journals of the men on board the boat, often intermingling
their descriptions of events with her own. The resulting prose
lends The Endurance a genuine feel of credibility and the reader
is often given several different views of the same event. But
what truly makes The Endurance an outstanding book is the accompanying
photographs of the ship's photographer, Frank Hurley. Peppered
throughout the text are 140 black and white photographs. The photographs
are often captioned with direct quotes from the crew's journals,
and harmoniously augment gripping text. Seldom has a more beautiful
book been published; the pictures are stunning, the story is gripping,
and the prose blatantly neutral while describing difficult, even
horrific events.
