The white darkness

Henry Worsley was a devoted husband and father and a decorated British special forces officer who believed in honor and sacrifice. He was also a man obsessed. He spent his life idolizing Ernest Shackleton, the nineteenth-century polar explorer, who tried to become the first person to reach the South...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Author: Grann, David (Author)
Format: Books Print Book
Language:English
Published: New York : Doubleday, [2018]
Edition:First Edition.
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Summary:Henry Worsley was a devoted husband and father and a decorated British special forces officer who believed in honor and sacrifice. He was also a man obsessed. He spent his life idolizing Ernest Shackleton, the nineteenth-century polar explorer, who tried to become the first person to reach the South Pole, and later sought to cross Antarctica on foot. Shackleton never completed his journeys, but he repeatedly rescued his men from certain death, and emerged as one of the greatest leaders in history. Worsley felt an overpowering connection to those expeditions. He was related to one of Shackleton's men, Frank Worsley, and spent a fortune collecting artifacts from their epic treks across the continent. He modeled his military command on Shackleton's legendary skills and was determined to measure his own powers of endurance against them. He would succeed where Shackleton had failed, in the most brutal landscape in the world. In 2008, Worsley set out across Antarctica with two other descendants of Shackleton's crew, battling the freezing, desolate landscape, life-threatening physical exhaustion, and hidden crevasses. Yet when he returned home he felt compelled to go back. On November 13, 2015, at age 55, Worsley bid farewell to his family and embarked on his most perilous quest: to walk across Antarctica alone. David Grann tells Worsley's remarkable story with the intensity and power that have led him to be called "simply the best narrative nonfiction writer working today." Illustrated with more than fifty stunning photographs from Worsley's and Shackleton's journeys, The White Darkness is both a gorgeous keepsake volume and a spellbinding story of courage, love, and a man pushing himself to the extremes of human capacity.
Physical Description:146 pages : illustrations (some color), map ; 19 cm
ISBN:9780385544573
038554457X
Author Notes:David Grann is a staff writer at The New Yorker. He graduated from Connecticut College in 1989, and earned a master's degree in international relations from the Fletcher School of Law & Diplomacy and a master's degree from Boston College in creative writing. He has written for The New York Times Magazine, The Atlantic, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, and The New Republic. His stories have been published in numerous anthologies of American writing. His books include The Devil and Sherlock Holmes, The Lost City of Z: A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon which won the Indies Choice award for the best nonfiction book of 2009, and Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI.

(Bowker Author Biography)