This is a new reading of the thrilling account of one of the most astonishing feats of exploration and human courage ever recorded.
In August of 1914, the British ship Endurance set sail for the South Atlantic. In October, 1915, still half a continent away from its intended base, the ship was trapped, then crushed in the ice. For five months, Sir Ernest Shackleton and his men, drifting on ice packs, were castaways in one of the most savage regions of the world.
Lansing describes how the men survived a 1,000-mile voyage in an open boat across the stormiest ocean in the world and an overland trek through forbidding glaciers and mountains. The book recounts a harrowing adventure, but ultimately it is the nobility of these men and their indefatigable will that shines through.
Alfred Lansing (1921–1975), a native of Chicago, was a journalist and writer. After serving in the US Navy, he majored in journalism at Northwestern University, edited a weekly newspaper until 1949, then joined the United Press, and in 1952 became a freelance writer. He is best known for his book Endurance, an account of Ernest Shackleton’s Antarctic explorations. In researching the book, he interviewed ten of the expedition’s surviving members and was granted access to the journals and personal diaries of eight others in order to get a more complete view of the expedition.
Simon Prebble has played in everything from soaps to Shakespeare on stage and television, but it is as a veteran narrator of over four hundred audiobooks that he has made his mark since coming to the United States in 1990. One of AudioFile’s Golden Voices, he has received over twenty Earphones Awards and five Publishers Weekly Listen-Up Awards, and he has been a finalist fourteen times for an Audie Award. He was Publishers Weekly’s 2006 Narrator of the Year and Booklist’s 2010 Voice of Choice.