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2000 Paperback New item supplied by a small team of booksellers from Hay-on-Wye, the Town of Books. Orders are dispatched same or next working day. Expect UK delivery in 1 to 5
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More About This Textbook
Overview
On November 12, 1912, a rescue team trekking across Antarctica's Great Ice Barrier finally found what they sought—the snow-covered tent of the British explorer Robert Falcon Scott. Inside, they made a grim discovery: Scott's frozen body lay between those of two fellow explorers. They had died just eleven miles from the depot of supplies that might have saved them. The remaining two members of the party were nowhere in sight, but Scott's eloquent diary revealed their nightmarishly similar fate. It is a story that continues to haunt the popular imagination, and which has never been told more grippingly or with greater compassion than in this book.
Editorial Reviews
Richard Bernstein
Diana Preston's absorbing and moving story. . .is both a biography of Scott and a succinct history of South Pole exploration. . .[She] tells the story of Scott's final and fatal expedition with bracing economy. . .at the end her spareunadorned account becomes deeply moving. —The New York TimesRobert Taylor
This stirring account demonstrates how a thrice-told tale can acquire arresting immediacy. . .Preston's vibrant biographical passages reveal the [men] in a human context. . .The solitude of the Antarctic[and] the diminuitive shapes of intruders filing acorss immense wastesis vividly rendered. —The Boston GlobeWalter Kirn
...What's devastating and fresh about the book is Preston's emphasis on personality. She understands the nuts and bolts of her expeditions, the physics of interpersonal psychology. . . Preston knows that to push the envelope and go where no man or woman has gone before, an explorer must first get out of his own head. -- New York MagazinePublishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly
"Had we lived, I should have had a tale to tell of the hardihood, endurance and courage of my companions which would have stirred the heart of every Englishman." So reads Captain Robert Falcon Scott's message from the grave, found in a tent with his frozen corpse and the bodies of two fellow explorers, after his expedition had lost the race to the South Pole. Disheartened by their defeat at the hands of the Norwegian Roald Amundsen, the British team struggled on their return trip, succumbing to the Antarctic elements only 11 miles from the fuel and food that might have saved them. Scott was the most revered of the major Antarctic explorers of his day: Amundsen may have personified professionalism, and Shackleton, endurance; but Scott--perhaps only by dying--represented the courage and heroism that an insecure, prewar Britain craved. Drawing on the poetic writings of the explorers themselves, Preston (The Road to Culloden Moor) illuminates Scott's occasional bad luck, inexperience and even ineptitude without diminishing his unquestionable courage, honor and humanity. Indeed, it is Preston's balanced look at Scott's life and its context that sets this book apart from the many other works on the subject. Three maps, two 8-page b&w inserts. (Nov.)Kirkus Reviews
An imaginative, sympathetic biography of the famous and ill-fated Antarctic explorer. English biographer Preston, author of a life of Bonnie Prince Charlie (The Road to Culloden Moor), attended a girls' high school in Hampstead in the entrance hall of which were emblazoned the words of Robert Falcon Scott: 'Had we lived I should have had a tale to tell of the hardihood, endurance and courage of my companions which would have stirred the heart of every Englishman.' Scott did not live, of course: he and four companions who had set off to find the South Pole in 1912 died horribly of starvation and cold, and in any event they were beaten to the pole by the Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen. Ironies attended their deaths, not the least of them the fact that Scott and his team perished just a few miles from a depot of food and supplies; all the same, Preston rightly notes, those deaths were not in vain, at least not on the national-pride front. England had nearly lost the Boer War, and the Titanic had recently sunk; the nation needed a hero and found one in a young naval officer who feared for the character of his own soul, thanks to a domineering father who accused him of indolence and cowardice, and who had a terror of being thought 'below par.' That Scott acquitted himself admirably on the ice and was considered a model leader by his men did not do much to give the explorer greater self-esteem, but, writes Preston, he confined expressing his terrors to his much-quoted diary, in which he recorded his last moments in the hope that he would thereby 'make a tale for our generation which I hope may not be lost in the telling.' Preston gracefully retells that stirring,unmistakably heroic, and sadly doomed adventure for a new generation.Product Details
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Meet the Author
Diana Preston, a historian and broadcaster, is the author of the Road to Culloden Moor, a life of Bonnie Prince Charlie. She lives in London, England.
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