Shackleton

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Ernest Shackleton is still by many considered the greatest of all British polar explorers : a hero to generations of British men and women.
Yet for much of his life he thought himself a failure. Of his three expeditions to the Antarctic, the first (under Scott's leadership) saw him invalided home ; on the second he failed by less than 100 miles in his attempt to reach the South Pole ; and on the third his ship Endurance was crushed in the ice before he could even start on his projected first crossing of the Antarctic continent. But the legend of his greatness remains. It was never doubted by the men he led, and is as firmly held today as it ever was.
Christopher Railing here throws light on the character and actions of this remarkable man through a chronological selection from Shackleton's own writings, public and private. Much of the material comes from his own books. The Heart of the Antarctic and South, both long out of print, which recount the triumphs and disasters of the... Tovább

Fülszöveg

Ernest Shackleton is still by many considered the greatest of all British polar explorers : a hero to generations of British men and women.
Yet for much of his life he thought himself a failure. Of his three expeditions to the Antarctic, the first (under Scott's leadership) saw him invalided home ; on the second he failed by less than 100 miles in his attempt to reach the South Pole ; and on the third his ship Endurance was crushed in the ice before he could even start on his projected first crossing of the Antarctic continent. But the legend of his greatness remains. It was never doubted by the men he led, and is as firmly held today as it ever was.
Christopher Railing here throws light on the character and actions of this remarkable man through a chronological selection from Shackleton's own writings, public and private. Much of the material comes from his own books. The Heart of the Antarctic and South, both long out of print, which recount the triumphs and disasters of the Nimrod and Endurance expeditions with the freshness and immediacy of the diaries on which they were largely based. Together with his poetry and letters - especially those to his wife, Emily - they build up to the lively self-portrait of a many-sided, complex and fascinating man : at once leader and romantic dreamer ; an inspirer of loyalty who could be implacable if he felt that loyalty was betrayed ; a self-confessed misfit in the regulated world of domesticity and the English social hierarchy of his day ; a man with the generous, buccaneering spirit of a gambler, who never felt truly at peace with himself except in the trackless wastes of the Antarctic.
Christopher Railing's biographical notes provide a framework for Shackleton's own words, setting them in their time. They also paint a vivid picture of the personality clashes which lay behind this, as so many other great human endeavours.
Christopher Ralhng, who also wrote the scripts for the BBC2 Shackleton series, is a freelance writer and television director. For many years he was on the staff of the BBC, where he made a succession of programmes on the theme of exploration. In 1966 he produced To the South Pole with Peter Scott, which retraced Captain Scott's last journey. This was followed in 1972 by the dramatised documentary series The Search for the Nile. He was a member of Chris Bonington's 1975 Himalayan expedition, and subsequently produced the film Everest the Hard Way. This was followed in 1978 by the enormously successful The Voyage of Charles Darwin.
The jacket shows Shackleton's ship Endurance beset by ice in the southern winter of 1915, after the contemporary photograph by Hurley. [Royal Geographical Society)
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