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This is the book that began my fascination with epic disasters in cold, icy places. I guess I wanted to understand why people risk their lives for adventure or exploration, which I admit I still don’t understand after reading dozens of books like this. But I keep reading them, just as drawn into the snowy, freezing landscapes as the mindset of these men and women who choose to go to the ends (and tops) of the world. What drives them? How do they explain themselves to family? How do they feel afterwards? And, always, what is the truth? Is there a truth? After reading Into Thin Air, I read The Climb by Anatoli Boukreev, which is about the same disaster on Mt. Everest, but with a different point-of-view. Boukreev at times contradicts Krakauer’s story. (He died in 1997 in an avalanche while climbing Annapurna in Nepal.) There are also other accounts of this particular Everest disaster (many other disasters have taken place on Everest, and still do today), each as riveting as the last.  Left For Dead by Beck Weathers, and No Shortcuts to the Top: Climbing the World’s 14 Highest Peaks by Ed Viesturs are also well worth the read. There may not be any answers to the why, and to what really happened, but each story, each perspective, is equally fascinating.

Did you know that Theodore Roosevelt ran for a third term, this time with the Progressive Party, a new, independent third party? That when he lost, he decided to join an expedition of The River of Doubt, a tributary of the Amazon River? He did, along with the Brazilian explorer Candido Rondon and Roosevelt’s son, Kermit. Of the nineteen men who attempted to map The River of Doubt, only sixteen survived.

Everything that could go wrong did. The explorers contracted serious diseases, lost canoes and built new ones, encountered white water rapids and portaged around them, and faced starvation and rebellion. One man drowned, one was murdered, and one (the murderer) was left behind. Roosevelt himself, suffering from Malaria, was wounded in his leg and developed an almost fatal infection. He even considered suicide before they were found by native “rubber-trappers” who helped them traverse the river back to civilization.

The descriptions of these events and of the dense, dangerous Amazon forest are absolutely riveting. Written by Candice Millard, this book is a must for anyone interested in the tragedy and triumphs of historical exploration.

              I love non-fiction about strong people who struggle through frightening events to somehow survive all the odds. These stories grab me because I want to believe we can persevere through the worst, but knowing that survival will take determination and hard work in order to defend our lives and beliefs. Franci’s War: A Woman’s Story of Survival by Franci Rabinek Epstein, is that kind of story.  Franci was a survivor of the Auschwitz-Birrkenau camps. Her daughter, Helen Epstein, has edited her mother’s journal and divided it into chapters to help the reader follow the story. 

Franci was born in Prague, in 1920.  At the age of nineteen she became the owner of her mother’s couture shop, but the Nazi’s had invaded Czechoslovakia and her world was rapidly changing.  Franci and her parents were arrested by the Gestapo, released, she got married, got pregnant—and decided on an abortion–and in the next year, Nazi’s took everything away and sent her to a concentration camp. She survived, in part, because she told them a lie, that  she was an electrician. Her story is amazing, honest, heartbreaking and inspiring, and, in my opinion, a must read to understand our past–so we never repeat it.    

The Endurance : Shackelton’s Incredible Voyage  by Alfred Lansing

This is one of my favorite Non-Fiction books of all time.  In August 1914 The Endurance, lead by Ernest Shackelton and his twenty-eight crew members set out to be the first explorers to cross the continent by way of the South Pole, taking scientific measurements and mapping a new territory.  But instead, the ship got trapped in ice. The crew abandoned ship, removing all they could before it sank, including their sled dogs, a few small boats and sledges, food and water, medical supplies and scientific equipment.  The explorers had to survive and find their way back to civilization by crossing on ice flows and open water, all while freezing cold and existing through unbearable hardships. The book captures the personalities of all the men who made this astonishing trip, as well as the descriptive icy landscape of the Antarctica.  Time and time again they were faced with a new crisis, and the story builds in tension to a point where I, on my couch, thought it couldn’t get worse—and then it did. But Shackelton leads them home, eventually, every last one of them. The narration by Simon Prebble lends just the right voice to this sobering and inspiring book.

https://libro.fm/audiobooks/9781481582568-endurance?bookstore=loganberrybooks