The party includes Frank Hurley, a photographer, who takes many beautiful shots during the expedition, several of them featured in the e-version of the book that I read. Because of the direction of ocean currents, they headed for South Georgia Island, about 800 miles away, rather than to the nearer South America ports. Consider also the inhospitable nature of the Antarctic seas, the ice floes, ice bergs, the frighteningly low temperatures, potentially the worst weather and sailing conditions anywhere on the planet, the risk of the ship becoming trapped and crushed in the ice.

On the book itself, the narrative was written by piecing together all the events experienced by the crew of the Endurance, accomplished via combing through every diary kept during the expedition and extensive interviews with almost all the surviving crew members.It's a tense thriller all the way through, and will make you so incredibly glad you have never had to go through anything like this. I must have burned 1000 calories reading this one; my legs were jiggling like crazy, my fingernails were bitten to the quick, my heart was just a’going. Hmm, high praise indeed, but I'm not fully on board the Shackleton bandwagon, because it was his ego and desire to earn fame and enough money to retire that precipitated this madcap venture. I have not read Alexander's book, so I can't say if this is a deficiency in the source material or not.

Y si solo conoces de oídas esta aventura, tanto mejor, no hace falta ni leer la sinopsis, que lo que hace es contar el principio y fin. Accompanying Lansing’s text are the evocative and very striking photograph’s taken by the expedition’s photographer Frank Hurley – which amazingly enough survived the ordeal of the expedition. I read this slowly as I was continually shifting from the text to the “Define” button (learning lots of new words related to perilous travel in the Antarctic) to Google (looking up map after map tracking the journey).I used to be OK with letting such stuff go as a "conversation starter" but I now think such fuzziness is too dangerous. For scientific discovery give me Scott; for speed and efficiency of travel give me Amundsen; but when disaster strikes and all hope is gone, get down on your knees and pray for Shackleton. Too weak to go on, a majority of the men remained there while Shackleton and five others set off in the James Caird for South Georgia. His ship was the Endurance, but little did her complement know that their own Endurance would be tested to the full after the ship was trapped in the ice in the Weddell Sea late in 1915 and had to be abandoned.

Después de que el noruego Roald Amundsen llegara al polo sur en 1911, quedó un vacío para las conquistas del hombre en la tierra.

I cried as I read the last page, not so much because of the ending, but just because I was finished with the book. I may have sounded less than adulatory of Shackleton, but I'm aware of the mesmerizing lure of Antarctica. I now know the difference between wet and dry gangrene; the latter is the lesser of the two evils, ugh. It's shorter, but it's a more cinematic presentation and they recreated a lot of the ocean and hiking sequences, showing what it was must have really looked like to be sitting in a lifeboat during a hurricane, or trying to hike up a frozen mountain range in leather shoes and threadbare clothes while you're exhausted, frostbitten, and half-starved. The story is brilliantly told and I enjoyed it all the more for having had no pre-knowledge of these events.

They were trapped on ice floes for months while they drifted north, until they were forced to take to the sea in the lifeboats they'd dragged off the ship.And the moment at the end, when Shackleton stumbles into the whaling camp on South Georgia Island and announces himself, will bring a lump to your throat just like the book.