These images, appearing together here for the first time in print, constitute an amazing body of photojournalism created under the most adverse circumstances imaginable. As this book reveals, however, they are far more than visual reportage; they also are images of great artistry that capture the life-and-death drama that was played out against an arctic landscape of magnificent and terrible beauty.The story told here through Frank Hurley's lens began in the summer of 1914, when Shackleton and his crew set sail from England with the intention of being the first to cross Antarctica from one coast to the other, passing through the South Pole on the way. After five months they reached the freezing Weddell Sea and were within sight of land when the Endurance became trapped in the ice pack. Nine months later, the ship was finally crushed, leaving the crew stranded on drifting ice floes at the end of the earth.What followed is one of the most remarkable survival stories in the history of human exploration. Shackleton's men camped on the ice floes for five months before they escaped in their lifeboats and, after a harrowing five-day voyage, reached Elephant Island, a barren outcrop too remote for any hope of rescue. From there, Shackleton and five other volunteers set out for South Georgia Island and miraculously reached their destination after traversing 850 miles of the fiercest seas on the face of the planet in an open lifeboat. There they raised help, and three months later, after three failed attempts, Shackleton made it back to Elephant Island with a rescue ship.Incredibly, every single one of his men survived. Almost as incredible is the fact that so much of this drama was captured on film by Frank Hurley, and that so many of these pictures survived. South with Endurance is the first book to reproduce a total of nearly 500 extant photographs, including many remarkable color images that have never been published before. It is also the first to reproduce the photos to a standard and size that display Hurley's work as the art that it is. Drawn from the archives of the Royal Geographical Society in London, the State Library of New South Wales in Sydney, and the Scott Polar Research Institute in Cambridge, the photographs are complemented by excerpts from Hurley's diary, a chapter about the expedition itself, a biographical essay, and commentary about Hurley's photographic techniques.

    How they mastered their situation, what they did, thought and observed are the subject of The Sheltering Desert. In it lies the vastness of the landscape, the clear skies, nature's silence in the joy or suffering of her creatures, and the stillness in which the reader, too, may take refuge from the wrongs of civilization.

    Now, Carl Hoffman uncovers startling new evidence that finally tells the full, astonishing story.Despite exhaustive searches, no trace of Rockefeller was ever found. Soon after his disappearance, rumors surfaced that he'd been killed and ceremonially eaten by the local Asmat—a native tribe of warriors whose complex culture was built around sacred, reciprocal violence, head hunting, and ritual cannibalism. The Dutch government and the Rockefeller family denied the story, and Michael's death was officially ruled a drowning. Yet doubts lingered. Sensational rumors and stories circulated, fueling speculation and intrigue for decades. The real story has long waited to be told—until now.Retracing Rockefeller's steps, award-winning journalist Carl Hoffman traveled to the jungles of New Guinea, immersing himself in a world of headhunters and cannibals, secret spirits and customs, and getting to know generations of Asmat. Through exhaustive archival research, he uncovered never-before-seen original documents and located witnesses willing to speak publically after fifty years.In Savage Harvest he finally solves this decades-old mystery and illuminates a culture transformed by years of colonial rule, whose people continue to be shaped by ancient customs and lore. Combining history, art, colonialism, adventure, and ethnography, Savage Harvest is a mesmerizing whodunit, and a fascinating portrait of the clash between two civilizations that resulted in the death of one of America's richest and most powerful scions.

    For years while storekeeping in the South Pacific, he planned, read and talked until the great day when he was landed on his little kingdom, aware of (but undismayed by) the fact that he would have to struggle with the full strength of body and mind to survive. Neale's gripping account of his years spent alone on Suvarov is an unforgettable tale of peril, beauty, and solitude.

    In 1977, at the age of seventeen, Conway left his family's comfortable suburban home to move to the Appalachian Mountains. For more than two decades he has lived there, making fire with sticks, wearing skins from animals he has trapped, and trying to convince Americans to give up their materialistic lifestyles and return with him back to nature. To Gilbert, Conway's mythical character challenges all our assumptions about what it is to be a modern man in America; he is a symbol of much we feel how our men should be, but rarely are.

    Larson's To the Edges of the Earth brings to life the climax of the age of exploration: in the year 1909 expeditions to the Arctic, Antarctica, and Himalaya pushed human accomplishment to the extremes and set records for altitude and the farthest north and south.In 1909, three daring expeditions pushed to the edges of the globe, bringing within reach, for the first time, a complete accounting of all the earth’s surface. In January, Douglas Mawson, as part of Ernest Shackleton’s Nimrod Expedition to Antarctica, became the first man to reach the South Magnetic Pole. Soon after, Shackleton himself set a new farthest south record in pursuit of the Geographic South Pole. In April, American Robert Peary, with Matthew Henson, claimed to be the first to reach the North Pole. And in the Himalayas—the so-called "Third Pole," the pole of altitude— a team led by legendary mountaineer and dashing Italian Prince Luigi Amedeo, the Duke of Abruzzi, reached 24,600 feet, setting a world altitude record that would stand for a generation.Drawing on both archival and on-the-ground research (he lived for two weeks in Shackleton's Antarctic hut), Larson interweaves the stories of these three expeditions into one dazzling adventure narrative that illuminates the spirit of the age.

    Each included adventure has been selected to show the extent to which Muir courted and faced danger, i.e. lived "wildly, " throughout his life. From the famous avalanche ride off the rim of Yosemite Valley to his night spent riding out a windstorm at the top of a tree to death-defying falls on Alaskan glaciers, the renowned outdoorsman's exploits are related in passages that are by turns exhilarating, unnerving, dizzying and outrageous.

    But after her mother, unsettled by growing political unrest, leaves for medical treatment in India, the civil war intensifies, changing young Enjeela’s life forever. Amid the rumble of invading Soviet tanks, Enjeela and her family are thrust into chaos and fear when it becomes clear that her mother will not be coming home.Thus begins an epic, reckless, and terrifying five-year journey of escape for Enjeela, her siblings, and their father to reconnect with her mother. In navigating the dangers ahead of them, and in looking back at the wilderness of her homeland, Enjeela discovers the spiritual and physical strength to find hope in the most desperate of circumstances.A heart-stopping memoir of a girl shaken by the brutalities of war and empowered by the will to survive, The Broken Circle brilliantly illustrates that family is not defined by the borders of a country but by the bonds of the heart.

    Eerie aspects of the incident—unexplained violent injuries, signs that they cut open and fled the tent without proper clothing or shoes, a strange final photograph taken by one of the hikers, and elevated levels of radiation found on some of their clothes—have led to decades of speculation over what really happened. This gripping work of literary nonfiction delves into the mystery through unprecedented access to the hikers' own journals and photographs, rarely seen government records, dozens of interviews, and the author's retracing of the hikers' fateful journey in the Russian winter. A fascinating portrait of the young hikers in the Soviet era, and a skillful interweaving of the hikers narrative, the investigators' efforts, and the author's investigations, here for the first time is the real story of what happened that night on Dead Mountain

    He's a man on a mission to save the world's most endangered plants from destruction and thieves hunting for wealthy collectors. He is a plant messiah.From the planet's tiniest waterlily - the Nymphaea thermarum - to Huarango trees with roots over 50 metres long, Carlos has a miraculous ability to bring breathtakingly beautiful plants back from the brink of extinction. He has travelled to the most remote and dangerous parts of the world - from the mountains of Peru to isolated Indian Ocean islands to the deepest Australian outback - in search of the rarest exotic species. Then, back in the Tropical Nursery at Kew, he uses pioneering, left-field techniques to help them grow.Now he's here to spread the gospel. The Plant Messiah is the inspirational story of a man who has devoted - and risked - his life to save incredible species, all in the name of making this Earth a greener and happier place. Amen to that.

    But the expedition went horribly wrong: Delayed by a hurricane, knocked off course by a colossal error of navigation, and ultimately doomed by a disastrous decision to separate the men from their ships, the mission quickly became a desperate journey of survival. Of the four hundred men who had embarked on the voyage, only four survived-three Spaniards and an African slave. This tiny band endured a horrific march through Florida, a harrowing raft passage across the Louisiana coast, and years of enslavement in the American Southwest. They journeyed for almost ten years in search of the Pacific Ocean that would guide them home, and they were forever changed by their experience. The men lived with a variety of nomadic Indians and learned several indigenous languages. They saw lands, peoples, plants, and animals that no outsider had ever before seen. In this enthralling tale of four castaways wandering in an unknown land, Andres Resendez brings to life the vast, dynamic world of North America just a few years before European settlers would transform it forever.

    And of the few who have known this dangerous way of life, fewer still can recount their adventures with the flair of this former professional hunter-turned-writer.Based on Capstick's own experiences and the personal accounts of his colleagues, Death in the Long Grass portrays the great killers of the African bush-- not only the lion, leopard, and elephant, but the primitive rhino and the crocodile waiting for its unsuspecting prey, the titanic hippo and the Cape buffalo charging like an express train out of control. Capstick was a born raconteur whose colorful descriptions and eye for exciting, authentic detail bring us face to face with some of the most ferocious killers in the world-- underrated killers like the surprisingly brave and cunning hyena, silent killers such as the lightning-fast black mamba snake, collective killers like the wild dog. Readers can lean back in a chair, sip a tall, iced drink, and revel in the kinds of hunting stories Hemingway and Ruark used to hear in hotel bars from Nairobi to Johannesburg, as veteran hunters would tell of what they heard beyond the campfire and saw through the sights of an express rifle.As thrilling as any novel, as taut and exciting as any adventure story, Death in the Long Grass takes us deep into the heart of darkness to view the Africa that few people have ever seen.

    Peter Allison gives us the guide’s-eye view of living in the bush, confronting the world’s fiercest terrain of wild animals and, most challenging of all, managing herds of gaping tourists. Passionate for the animals of the Kalahari, Allison works as a top safari guide in the wildlife-rich Okavango Delta. As he serves the whims of his wealthy clients, he often has to stop the impulse to run as far away from them as he can, as these tourists are sometimes more dangerous than a pride of lions. No one could make up these outrageous-but-true tales: the young woman who rejected the recommended safari-friendly khaki to wear a more “fashionable” hot pink ensemble; the lost tourist who happened to be drunk, half-naked, and a member of the British royal family; establishing a real friendship with the continent’s most vicious animal; the Japanese tourist who requested a repeat performance of Allison’s being charged by a lion so he could videotape it; and spending a crazy night in the wild after blowing a tire on a tour bus, revealing that Allison has as much good-natured scorn for himself. The author’s humor is exceeded only by his love and respect for the animals, and his goal is to limit any negative exposure to humans by planning trips that are minimally invasive—unfortunately it doesn’t always work out that way! Peter Allison is originally from Sydney, Australia. His safaris have been featured in National Geographic, Conde Nast Traveler, and on television programs such as Jack Hanna's Animal Adventures. He travels frequently to speaking appearances, and splits most of his time between Botswana, Sydney, and San Francisco.

    Born a poor Scotsman, Alexander Selkirk signed with William Dampier, a pirate who was as famous for his self-promotion as for his naval success, on an ill-fated quest to pillage the famous Manila galleon. After a series of scuffles with the captain, Selkirk was put ashore on an island three hundred miles west of South America. Alone and with little more than the clothes on his back, Selkirk spent four long years learning to survive. Drawing on Selkirk's own testimony, that of his rescuers and fellow crewmen, and petitions from two women who each claimed to be his wife, celebrated biographer Diana Souhami uncovers the truth behind the strangeness and wonder of a forgotten man and his unforgettable experience.

    While global warming has brought several such routes into existence, until recently these channels were hopelessly choked by impassible ice. Voyagers faced unimaginable horrors—entire ships crushed, mass starvation, disabling frostbite, even cannibalism—in pursuit of a futile goal. In Arctic Labyrinth, Glyn Williams charts the entire sweep of this extraordinary history, from the tiny, woefully equipped vessels of the first Tudor expeditions to the twentieth-century ventures that finally opened the Passage. Williams’s thrilling narrative delves into private letters and journals to expose the gritty reality behind the often self-serving accounts of those in charge. An important work of maritime history and exploration—and as exciting a tale of heroism and fortitude as readers will find—Arctic Labyrinth is also a remarkable study in human delusion.