Endurance

This is one of the best survival guides ever, and one of the most compelling looks into how human beings do or don’t accept a disastrous situation and (literally) flow with it. It’s the story of the explorer Ernest Shackleton and his crew, after their ship, the aptly named Endurance, got stuck in the Antarctic ice and then crushed by it. They were stranded, through the permanent darkness of the polar winter, on floating ice floes—with only blubber to eat, and no fiber at all (you work out the consequences). No shelter. No light. Water and waves underneath you.… show more.

It’s the name of the book, it’s the name of the ship, and there isn’t a more accurate descriptor imageable for this horrific, and amazing story of survival. Time after time after time, just when you think something is finally going to go right for the crew of the Endurance, everything gets worse. Yet they continue on, against all conceivable odds. Lansing’s masterpiece recounts Ernest Shackleton’s well-known and ill-fated journey to Antarctica, and the multi-year survival of him and his crew. A true nonfiction thriller, you really cannot imagine what is in store for these poor men. How they… show more.

Shackleton’s voyage to the Antarctic is spellbinding, sweeping over me like a tsunami. It begins with the loss of the Endurance, crushed in the ice: “she seemed a huge creature suffering and gasping for breath, her sides heaving against the strangling pressure.” An odd narrative with a huge cast of characters and reconstructed from logbooks, notes, and memories of survivors, what is the secret of its success? I have never read a story in which the elements of the natural world exerted such a continuous challenge. Nature sinks the ship, sends a leopard seal loping across the ice in… show more.

I read this book after my near-fatal accident in the mountains. The story gave me perspective about enduring hardship. It also rekindled my own adventurous ambitions. This is a gripping tale about Ernest Shackleton’s expedition to the South Pole in the early 1900’s. Shackleton and his crew were trapped in sea ice before making a harrowing escape in their small lifeboats across frigid and turbulent seas to the shores of South Georgia Island. Later, he and a small group of men traversed glacier-covered mountains to get help at a remote whaling station. Shackleton’s feat of keeping his crew alive for… show more.