47 of 47 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Thrilling and tragic, January 22, 2008
This review is from: The Worst Journey in the World (Penguin Classics) (Mass Market Paperback)
Apsley Cherry-Garrard was only 24 when he set out on Scott's ill-fated Terra Nova expedition. He was the youngest member of the group and, for my money, the best qualified for the later task of writing the complete story. Why? The Worst Journey in the World is an awe-inspiring adventure, told in such a way that you feel the young man's wide-eyed wonder as your own.
Very few novels have gripped and excited me as this book has, and far fewer nonfiction works. Cherry--as his friends called him--writes with a vigor and attention to detail and drama usually reserved for thrillers. The blizzards, storms at sea, killer whale attacks, sub-zero temperatures, and exhausting struggles with sled dogs, ponies, and yawning crevasses are vividly depicted. By the end of the book, you almost feel as though you've been on the journey with him. The "you are there" phenomenon is something I encounter very seldom in a book. This book actually managed to make me cold.
The Worst Journey in the World is not solely devoted to the adventure and the final tragedy of finding Scott and his men frozen to death. Cherry takes time out to comment on the scientific significance of their work in Antarctica, of the need for exploration regardless of immediate results, and, in conclusion, of why Scott's return from the Pole ended so bitterly. These sections of the work put the adventure into perspective, so that not only do you experience the good and bad times with the expedition, you learn what ideals drove them and what was at stake with every piece of bad luck.
The book isn't perfect, of course. Some of the scientific information Cherry relates is, of course, now outdated. The book starts off rather slowly, and the reader must pick up and remember the names of the other expeditionary members on their own--Cherry does not list or describe the others in detail until somewhere near the middle of the book.
That said, The Worst Journey in the World is still an outstanding nonfiction adventure. Once I started this book I could read nothing else. Anyone with an interest in the Antarctic, history, or exploration in general will find this book fascinating.
Highly recommended.
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24 of 26 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
An Adventure book Inside a History Book, April 6, 2006
This review is from: The Worst Journey in the World (Penguin Classics) (Mass Market Paperback)
In 1911-1912 the author as a young man was part of the ill fated
Robert Falcon Scott British Expedition to be the "first" at the South Pole. The larger history of that effort's limited success and the stories of the lives lost is a well told as historical fact. Within the book lies the Chapter about the author's effort with two other companions to travel in a winter journey for the purpose of observing Emperor penguins in their nesting rookeries. This is the coldest journey "on record" with howling winds at -70 degrees f under total darkness climbing between open crevasses that were endlessly deep to retrieve a few unhatched eggs for scientific research. Once you've read this author's rendition of that "worst journey" no other adventure travelog can compare. Good reading and most unforgettable.
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14 of 14 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
In this case, Worst Journey is no conceit, May 3, 2008
This review is from: The Worst Journey in the World (Penguin Classics) (Mass Market Paperback)
It's been more than ten years since I read Cherry-Garrard's account of Scott's journey to Antarctica, but I can still feel the lung-searing cold and hear the hellish, monstrous wind coming out of the center of the continent into which the journey was headed. I have never read of anything more terrible than this expedition including Shackleton's truncated Antarctic nightmare and Lewis and Clark's astonishing and dangerous overland haul from St. Louis to the Pacific.
This particular expedition was one terrible misadventure after another almost from the very start when there is a storm at sea right out of the gate as the ship carrying everyone and everything from Tierra del Fuego is swamped and so much food, materiel, and livestock are lost overboard. From there the bad luck never seems to stop. The very fact that these men continued on under circumstances that would have discouraged and then defeated most human beings is almost past credibility. In particular I remember the constant breaking down of the diesel-engined snow cats, the terrible fate of the Asian ponies, the leopard seals, and the long dark impossible trip that Garrard and one other member of the expedition take in the dead of the Antarctic winter to the Emperor Penguin breeding grounds to retrieve a few precious eggs for science. In winter. In the dark. Wearing 1911 woolen clothes, eating preseved 1911 food, and using 1911 (non-)technology. It took 1911 men to do it. I cannot imagine anyone from our time doing this with that equipment. At times I simply had to stop reading and wonder just how much more hardship human beings could stand. I've never felt so physically uncomfortable, so drained and so worried (as a mere reader!) as I was ploughing through this book which was a feat (the writing of it) in itself.
This is a story about a long-vanished era where grit and determination were measured on a different scale from what we see today. An absolute must for any lover of true adventure. It truly was the worst journey in the world against which any subsequent mission of its kind - including extra-terrestrial - must be judged.
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