Endurance

In August 1914, as war engulfed Europe, Sir Ernest Shackleton and twenty-seven men sailed south aboard the Endurance, intending to make the first overland crossing of Antarctica. They never set foot on the continent. Deep in the Weddell Sea their ship was trapped, then slowly crushed, by the pack ice, leaving the expedition stranded on the drifting floes with three small lifeboats and whatever they could salvage from the wreck.

Alfred Lansing's 1959 account reconstructs the twenty months that followed: the long, freezing drift on the ice; the desperate open-boat journey to barren Elephant Island; and Shackleton's near-suicidal 800-mile crossing of the Southern Ocean to South Georgia in a 22-foot lifeboat, followed by a first-ever traverse of the island's uncharted mountains to reach a whaling station and mount a rescue. Every one of his men survived.

Drawing on the diaries and firsthand testimony of the crew, Lansing tells the story with the pace and tension of a thriller while never straying from the record. Endurance has become the definitive account of the expedition and a classic study of leadership and human resilience under conditions few could imagine.