Antarctica

Antarctica: An Intimate Portrait of a Mysterious Continent

Gabrielle Walker

Walker draws on her own visits as a scientist to explore what it means to stand in the most alien, inhospitable place on the planet, and why it continues to fascinate so many different kinds of people. Her account moves between hard science and personal wonder in a way few books on the continent manage.

Antarctica: A History in 100 Objects

Jean de Pomereu and Daniella McCahey

De Pomereu and McCahey trace the story of this remarkable continent through one hundred objects sourced from polar institutions and collections around the world, from the iconic to the exotic, the refreshingly mundane to the indispensable. It offers a physical history of Antarctica told through what people actually carried, used, and left behind there.

Antarctica: A Biography

David Day

Day delivers a compelling scholarly account of two centuries of exploration, scientific investigation, and contentious geopolitics across this vast land. It is the strongest single volume for understanding how Antarctica came to be governed by no one and claimed by many.

The Last Place on Earth: Scott and Amundsen's Race to the South Pole

Roland Huntford

At the start of the twentieth century, the South Pole stood as the most coveted prize of a fiercely nationalistic age of exploration. Huntford's dual biography examines every detail of the race between Britain's Robert Scott and Norway's Roald Amundsen, and the very different choices that decided who reached it first.

The Worst Journey in the World: Antarctic 1910 to 1913

Apsley Cherry-Garrard

Cherry-Garrard's renowned memoir of the ill-fated British Antarctic Expedition, led by Robert Falcon Scott, was written by a survivor and first published in 1922. It remains one of the most vivid firsthand accounts ever written of what the ice actually costs those who cross it.

Endurance: Shackleton's Incredible Voyage

Alfred Lansing

Lansing delivers the definitive account of Sir Ernest Shackleton's 1914 to 1915 attempt at an overland crossing of Antarctica, an expedition that failed in its original aim yet became one of history's great triumphs of survival against the odds. It remains the essential starting point for understanding what a polar expedition actually demands of the people who attempt one.

Mawson's Will: The Greatest Polar Survival Story Ever Written

Lennard Bickel

Sir Edmund Hillary called it the most outstanding solo journey ever recorded in Antarctic history. For weeks, explorer Douglas Mawson faced blistering wind, snow, and cold, the loss of his companions, his dogs, and his supplies, and the slow failure of his own body, and still he survived.

Alone: The Classic Polar Adventure

Richard E. Byrd

When Admiral Byrd set out on his second Antarctic expedition in 1934, already a hero for having piloted the first flights over both poles, his plan was to spend six months alone near the bottom of the world gathering weather data. Early on, everything went wrong, and the account that follows is Byrd's own record of what came next.

The Birthday Boys

Beryl Bainbridge

Bainbridge builds this dramatic work of historical fiction around Robert Falcon Scott's famed and fatal expedition to Antarctica, narrated in turn by five of the men who took part in it. It offers a more intimate, novelistic counterpart to the historical accounts elsewhere on this list.

Antarctic Wildlife: A Visitor's Guide

James Lowen

Lowen offers a compact yet thorough identification guide to the birds and marine mammals of the Antarctic Peninsula, the Drake Passage, and the Beagle Channel. It is a practical companion for anyone hoping to recognize what they are seeing from the deck or the shore.