;) I live to please, anon. (I do read a lot of garbage, though! Mostly mysteries.)
Re: Polar exploration. You ask that and I suddenly forgot every book I've ever read. But here are a few.
The Last Viking: The Life of Roald Amundsen by Stephen Brown. About the guy who was the first to sail the Northwest Passage, the first to visit the South Pole, the first to cross the Northeast Passage, and fly over the North Pole... Amundsen was a really interesting guy and this is the book that made me take a look at 20th-century polar history.
Race for the South Pole: The Expedition Diaries of Scott and Amundsen. This one is interesting because it's a contrast between two expeditions, with the same goal, which took place at the same time: one that was meticulously planned and went exactly as expected, and one that was a clusterfuck and ended tragically. Looking at them together just really drives home how and why it all went the way it did. I'd read Amundsen's diary before, and excerpts from Scott's, but the part that makes this book interesting is it also includes Olav Bjaaland's diary - unlike the other two it was never intended for publication, so we get a look at Amundsen and the Norwegian side of the expedition that nobody was ever intended to see.
Dead Reckoning: The Untold Story of the Northwest Passage by Ken McGoogan. Kind of rolling my eyes at the title now that I think of it, because every Canadian knows the story of the Franklin expedition, but this particular book is notable because (at the time of purchase) it was the only one that was up-to-date enough to include information about the recently-rediscovered wreck of the HMS Erebus. This author also wrote Lady Franklin's Revenge, which I don't own but have read - it's a biography of her and the story of her exploration-related ambitions, and how she handled the fallout of the Franklin expedition. She was a very interesting person in her own right.
In general it's not just exploration stuff that I like - I'm very drawn to anything that relates to cold settings, fiction and nonfiction both.
Re: itt: books
Re: Polar exploration. You ask that and I suddenly forgot every book I've ever read. But here are a few.
The Last Viking: The Life of Roald Amundsen by Stephen Brown. About the guy who was the first to sail the Northwest Passage, the first to visit the South Pole, the first to cross the Northeast Passage, and fly over the North Pole... Amundsen was a really interesting guy and this is the book that made me take a look at 20th-century polar history.
Race for the South Pole: The Expedition Diaries of Scott and Amundsen. This one is interesting because it's a contrast between two expeditions, with the same goal, which took place at the same time: one that was meticulously planned and went exactly as expected, and one that was a clusterfuck and ended tragically. Looking at them together just really drives home how and why it all went the way it did. I'd read Amundsen's diary before, and excerpts from Scott's, but the part that makes this book interesting is it also includes Olav Bjaaland's diary - unlike the other two it was never intended for publication, so we get a look at Amundsen and the Norwegian side of the expedition that nobody was ever intended to see.
Dead Reckoning: The Untold Story of the Northwest Passage by Ken McGoogan. Kind of rolling my eyes at the title now that I think of it, because every Canadian knows the story of the Franklin expedition, but this particular book is notable because (at the time of purchase) it was the only one that was up-to-date enough to include information about the recently-rediscovered wreck of the HMS Erebus. This author also wrote Lady Franklin's Revenge, which I don't own but have read - it's a biography of her and the story of her exploration-related ambitions, and how she handled the fallout of the Franklin expedition. She was a very interesting person in her own right.
In general it's not just exploration stuff that I like - I'm very drawn to anything that relates to cold settings, fiction and nonfiction both.