THE CRYSTAL DESERT: SUMMERS IN ANTARCTICA is the story of life’s tenacity on the coldest of Earth’s continents. It tells of the explorers who discovered Antarctica, of the whalers and sealers who despoiled it, and of the scientists who are deciphering its mysteries. In beautiful, lucid prose, David G. Campbell chronicles the desperately short summers on the Antarctic …
Arctic History
Ice Blink: The Tragic Fate of Sir John Franklin’s Lost Polar Expedition
Absorbing.artfully narrat[es] a possible course of events in the expedition’s demise, based on the one official note and bits of debris (including evidence of cannibalism) found by searchers sent to look for Franklin in the 1850s. Adventure readers will flock to this fine regaling of the enduring mystery surrounding the best-known disaster in Arctic exploration.–Booklist””A great Victorian adventure …
“One of the great strengths of Arctic Voices is that it shows how Alaska and the Arctic are tied to the places where most of us live. In this impassioned book, Banerjee shows a situation so serious that it has created a movement, where ‘voices of resistance are gathering, are getting louder and louder.’ May his heartfelt efforts magnify them. The climate changes that are coming have hit soon and hard in …
At sixteen, Edward Beauclerk Maurice impulsively signed up with the Hudson’s Bay Company — the company of Gentleman Adventurers — and ended up at an isolated trading post in the Canadian Arctic, where there was no communication with the outside world and only one ship arrived each year. But he was not alone. The Inuit people who traded …
Chasing Shackleton: Re-creating the World’s Greatest Journey of Survival
In this extraordinary adventure memoir and tie-in to the PBS documentary, Tim Jarvis, one of the world’s leading explorers, describes his modern-day journey to retrace, for the first time ever—and in period clothing and gear—the legendary 1914 expedition of Sir Ernest Shackleton.In early 1914, British explorer Sir Ernest Shackleton and his team sailed for Antarctica, attempting to be …
The Storied Ice: Exploration, Discovery, and Adventure in Antarctica’s Peninsula Region
”The Storied Ice: Exploration, Discovery, and Adventure in Antarctica’s Peninsula Region” recounts mankind’s dramatic history from Magellan through the first years of the twenty-first century in the part of the Antarctic regions below South America and the Atlantic Ocean. This part of the world, by far the most visited portion of the south polar regions, is not only …
Long ago we invited bears into our stories, our dreams, our nightmares, our lives. We have always sought them out where they live, for their hides, their meat, their beauty, their knowingness. Human country and bear country exist side by side.As Sherry Simpson suggests, the relationship between bears and humans is ancient and ongoing and, in Alaska, profoundly …
“Nail-biting true adventure.”–Kirkus Reviews 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 …
The Last Imaginary Place: A Human History of the Arctic World
The Arctic of towering icebergs and midnight sun, of flaming auroras and endless winter nights, has long provoked flights of the imagination. Now, in The Last Imaginary Place, renowned archeologist Robert McGhee lifts the veil to reveal the true Arctic world. Based on thirty years of work with native peoples of the Arctic and travel in the region, …
A History of the Arctic: Nature, Exploration and Exploitation
Bitter cold and constant snow. Polar bears, seals, and killer whales. Victor Frankenstein chasing his monstrous creation across icy terrain in a dogsled. The arctic calls to mind a myriad different images. Consisting of the Arctic Ocean and parts of Canada, the United States, Russia, Greenland, Finland, Norway and Sweden, the arctic possesses a unique ecosystem—temperatures average negative …