Endurance: Shackleton's Incredible Voyage

Synopsis
The harrowing true story of Ernest Shackleton's ill-fated journey to Antarctica. 

My take
"Our mission was called a 'successful failure' in that we returned safely but never made it to the moon." That's a line from Apollo 13, and before there was Apollo 13 there was the Endurance. Both were epic journeys to inhospitable places that turned into races for survival. In the case of the Endurance, all 22 crew members amazingly survived.

Shackleton's attempt to cross the White Continent on foot was never supposed to be an easy feat, but his tale of survival is even more thrilling. The Endurance was trapped in ice before the crew could get to its landing site. Shackleton and his men lived on board, hoping for a thaw, until they were forced to abandon ship before the ice destroyed it. What followed was an incredible trek over miles of ice and and open water to try to find help. The book is pieced together from some of the crew members' diaries, and it includes everything from the dramatic escape from a ship being crushed by ice to the mundane day-to-day activities of 22 men living in close quarters with dwindling food supplies.

Shackleton himself rarely takes center stage in this account because he always remained somewhat aloof from the rest of the men. He was acutely conscious that he was their leader and that they all depended on him to make life-or-death decisions for all of them. The book paints a portrait of him as a pioneer and a skilled leader.

The book is aimed at a lay audience and it generally explains nautical terms and other technicalities well, but the only slow parts of the read were the descriptions of ships.

Bottom line
It's a thrilling adventure story, but read it either in the height of summer or in front of a roaring fire because you'll inevitably feel chilled to the bone after reading about survival in subzero temperatures.

Fine print
Endurance: Shackleton's Incredible Voyage, by Alfred Lansing 
Genre: non-fiction, history
Photo from Goodreads
I borrowed this book from the library