The Mammoth Book of Endurance and Adventure

Fifty vivid true-life accounts from the Great Age of Exploration, in the words of the intrepid adventurers who survived to tell the tale. Inspired by Sir Ernest Shackleton's account of his Antarctic expedition aboard the Endurance and including his own gripping tale of an 800-mile voyage across polar waters on a lifeboat, this anthology comprises fifty true-life adventures taken from contemporary memoirs, letters, and journals -- among them, selections by Thor Heyerdahl on the Kon Tiki, Edmund Hillary on Everest, Robert Falcon-Scott on the South Pole, Chris Bonnington on the Blue Nile, Wilfred Thesiger on the Arabian desert, and Beryl Markham on her east-to-west flight across the Atlantic.