A dozen or so years ago, I went through a phase of reading travel adventure tales. Like other phases I’ve gone through, I became insatiable for months on end, gobbling up accounts of shipwrecks and quests for the source of the Nile, mountain men and pioneers, mountain climbers and Englishmen abducted by African slavers. And then I came to the most brilliant adventure tale of them all:Endurance: Shackleton’s Incredible Voyage by Alfred Lansing, the true story of Ernest Shackleton’s harrowing journey to Antartica, which became at once a struggle against desolation, despair, and weakness as the small group of men – hardy bigger-than-life souls – eventually conquered nature’s most frighteningly beautiful continent. I could wax eloquent about this classic real-life adventure tale for many pages, but suffice it to say that if you choose to read it, it will enthrall and amaze you and make you marvel at nature’s fierce brutality and man’s endless ability to surmount it.

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