Caroline Alexander

In August 1914, days before the outbreak of the First World War, the renowned explorer Ernest Shackleton and a crew of twenty-seven set sail for the South Atlantic in pursuit of the last unclaimed prize in the history of exploration: the first crossing on foot of the Antarctic continent. Weaving a treacherous path through the freezing Weddell Sea, they had come within eighty-five miles of their destination when their ship, Endurance, was trapped fast in the ice pack. Soon the ship was crushed like matchwood, leaving the crew stranded on the floes. Their ordeal would last for twenty months, and they would make two near-fatal attempts to escape by open boat before their final rescue.Drawing upon previously unavailable sources, Caroline Alexander gives us a riveting account of Shackleton's expedition--one of history's greatest epics of survival. And she presents the astonishing work of Frank Hurley, the Australian photographer whose visual record of the adventure has never before been published comprehensively. Together, text and image re-create the terrible beauty of Antarctica, the awful destruction of the ship, and the crew's heroic daily struggle to stay alive, a miracle achieved largely through Shackleton's inspiring leadership. The survival of Hurley's remarkable images is scarcely less miraculous: The original glass plate negatives, from which most of the book's illustrations are superbly reproduced, were stored in hermetically sealed cannisters that survived months on the ice floes, a week in an open boat on the polar seas, and several more months buried in the snows of a rocky outcrop called Elephant Island. Finally Hurley was forced to abandon his professional equipment; he captured some of the most unforgettable images of the struggle with a pocket camera and three rolls of Kodak film.Published in conjunction with the American Museum of Natural History's landmark exhibition on Shackleton's journey, The Endurance thrillingly recounts one of the last great adventures in the Heroic Age of exploration--perhaps the greatest of them all.From the Hardcover edition.

Many have forgotten that the subject of the "Illiad" was war--not merely the poetical romance of the war at Troy, but war, in all its enduring devastation. This groundbreaking reading of Homer's epic poem restores the poet's vision of the tragedy of war, addressing many of the central questions that define the war experience of every age.

"In Xanadu did Kubla Khan, a stately pleasure-dome decree..." So begins Samuel Taylor Coleridge's "Kubla Khan," one of the most famous and captivating poems in the English language. It is also the starting point for this mesmerizing and wide-ranging account of Caroline Alexander's quest to experience firsthand the places that collectively inspired Coleridge's legendary poetic vision of the mythic seat of pleasure. Driven by a lifelong fascination with this poetic masterpiece and by her limitless curiosity, Alexander brilliantly reconstructs the origins of Coleridge's haunting images as she leads us across three continents - from the windswept steppes of Inner Mongolia, where the great Khan held sway, to North Florida with its "mighty fountains," to Kashmir's mystical and holy cave of ice, to sacred "Mount Abora" in Ethiopia. Alongside her meticulous literary detective work, Alexander offers us the richly strange histories of these places, and conveys with her unfailing eye their surpassing natural wonder. Her witty and elegant chronicles also present an amazing array of characters - from stony-faced officials upholding the great wall of Chinese bureaucracy to tough-minded Floridians battling the bureaucracy of our own federal government. . As Alexander reminds us, Coleridge, who composed his great work in an opium reverie, himself never actually visited the places he evoked so powerfully, but merely read about them in a diverse collection of travel and discovery narratives, which were definitively catalogued in 1927 by the renowned scholar John Livingston Lowes. The power of these works to feed the poet's imagination inspires Alexander's intriguing speculation about the value and purpose of travel writing in our own age. Endlessly entertaining and richly informative, The Way to Xanadu is an utterly original blend of travel writing and literary scholarship.