About this title: Cherry-Garrard, who accompanied Robert Falcon Scott to the Antarctic on the explorer's doomed quest for the South Pole, recounts the unforgettable journey across forbidding, inhospitable terrain. He was also a member of the search party that ultimately discovered Scott's frozen body along with his last notebook entries. With an introduction by ...
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Description: Acceptable. 1997-Paperback----Used-Acceptable-Hall Street Books proudly ships from Brooklyn, NY. All orders are processed and shipped within 24 hours, M-F. 100% money back No-Worry guarantee with expedited delivery and delivery confirmation available. read more
Edition: Not Stated
Binding: Soft BOUND
Publisher: Natl Geographic Society, Washington, D.C., U.S.A.
Date Published: 2002
ISBN-13:9780792266341ISBN:079226634X
Description: Very Good. NO Dj. 6 By 9 " 561 PAGES. VERY GOOD SOFTBOUND. A NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC ADVENTURE CLASSIC WITH NEW INTRODUCTION BY ANTHONY BRANDT. BOOK HAS LITTLE WEAR. read more
Description: Very Good. No Jacket. Very good. No dust jacket as issued. Trade paperback (US). Glued binding. Four maps. Audience: General/trade. (Polar Exploration) read more
Description: Fine. No dust jacket as issued. book tight clean, bright pages, cover slight corner roughness, very small crease. Trade paperback (US). Glued binding. 704 p. Audience: General/trade. read more
Description: New. **NEW** Book is in excellent condition, binding tight, pages crisp & clean. No remainder marks. Shipped with delivery confirmation inside US. Selling books since 1979*p/BN-L1-23. read more
Binding: Trade paperback
Publisher: National Geographic Society
Date Published: 2002
ISBN-13:9780792266341ISBN:079226634X
Description: Very good. No dust jacket as issued. Trade paperback (US). Glued binding. 561 p. Contains: Illustrations. Audience: General/trade. read more
Binding: Softcover
Publisher: Penguin Classics
Date Published: 2006-03-01
ISBN-13:9780143039389ISBN:0143039385
Description: NEW. Softcover. From an inventory that is 100% brand-new, 100% direct from the publishers' distribution channel. We carry NO pre-owned, NO remaindered. We pack in CARDBOARD to ensure the pristine quality is maintained. (Bubble-wrap alone is NOT sufficient to protect from USPS equipment. ) Guaranteed brand-NEW, protected with CARDBOARD, your satisfaction is guaranteed. BKLUVID: 9780143039389. read more
"I wish i woulda read this book before going to antarctica. Cherry-Garrard's positivity is so admirable and the morale of these explorers is so incredibly superior to that of myself and most of my coworkers at McMurdo. As hard as life is there now, man, these guys had it a hundred times rougher."
It's long. There are 8o pages of introduction before you get to page 1 - some 50 or so by the author, providing some background material for the reader, and the rest by George Seaver as a preface to the 1985 edition, shedding a little light on the life, character, and habits of the author. These both make great reading: I recall thinking that if the book was as enthralling as its lead-in material, I had something to look forward to. And it was, and I did.
The book is about Scott's 1910 expedition to the Antarctic. The expedition is remembered for Scott's drive on the Pole, but the book also deals with some other of its aspects. Just the telling of the trip from England to New Zealand, and then again the one from there to the Ross Sea, would be an amazing read. But then it really gets going.
The title of the book comes from a mid-winter trip along one side of Ross Island, some 70 miles or so, by three men (one of them the author) dragging a sledge through constant night, gale winds, and temperatures typically -65F (sometimes below) for over a month - all to get a penguin egg. This was the Worst Journey, but that epigram is meant, I'm sure, to echo across the entire trip.
The writing is, for the most part, very matter-of-fact. You're not told, for example, about every time someone falls through a crevasse and has to be hauled back up; you've been told that it happens several times a day and you should simply remember that if the conditions are present, it's probably happening. Quite a lot of the story is told by excerpting diary entries from one man or another, and those diary entries have that same property: there's no dwelling on the hardships (though you are informed of the conditions that produce them), and certainly not on any problem the writer might be having. The reader is expected to understand these things from hints and small mentions. It all seems very stereotypically British in that regard. And yet it still grabs you. You feel the days go by, the progress being made, the failures, the small daily trips and chores, the wet, the dry, the weather, and on and on.
I don't think that imagination can come anywhere near what it's like to live that life for a moment, let alone for three years. Fun to try, though, from my living room."
"Read this book and you'll never bitch about stuff like not having enough towels in your hotel room or an over-cooked steak you were served at a restaurant in Paris. Yet another story that makes the modern man relize that there are no more worlds to discover. Polar exploration was just about the last of the travels into the unknown. I don't count space exploration because for that you need an entire country's economy behind you. Now any knob can circle the world with only a credit card. Sic transit gloria mundi."
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