Customer Reviews

Antarctic Eyewitness: South With Mawson and Shackleton's Argonauts

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This new book combines Charles Laseron's 1947 "South With Mawson" and Frank Hurley's 1948 "Shackleton's Argonauts" in one volume, continuing the wonderful flood of reprints relating to the heroic era of Antarctic exploration. Laseron's account of the 1912 Mawson expedition is full of human interest, and makes a useful adjunct to Mawson's own, somewhat drier account in "Home of the Blizzard." Laseron was a careful observer of his surroundings and his fellow expedition members, and his writing style is vivid and often humorous. This half of the book includes photographs by expedition photographer Frank Hurley, whose own memoirs of the Endurance voyage make up the second half of the book. Frank Hurley's "Shackleton's Argonauts" is a gripping description of the Endurance expedition, also illustrated with some of Hurley's magnificent photographs. Having served with both Sir Douglas Mawson and Sir Ernest Shackleton, Hurley compares the two men in a couple of wonderful paragraphs, concluding "Shackleton grafted science onto exploration; Mawson added exploration onto science," a very good way of summing up the differences between the leaders. Hurley also shows himself to have been an early environmentalist, and expresses in no uncertain terms his horror of the South Atlantic whaling industry and its slaughter of those great animals, commenting "I had marvelled at the devices that enabled man's ingenuity to triumph over nature's moods and most powerful creatures, but I marvelled still more that man was unable to triumph over the seemingly more potent monster of his creating; its name is greed," to which I can only add, "amen." Anyone interested in Antarctic exploration will want to add this valuable reprint to their library, and I cannot recommend it more highly.