Roland Huntford has written perhaps the best study of polar exploration. The contrast between the two , Amundsen and Scott, is so striking, it is a wonder that Scott is generally remembered at all.His methods were so slack, his personality so ill-suited to the task at hand, his leadership bordered on being criminally negligent. Scott became that strange type of British hero, one whose incompetence is romanticized into fame( i.e. The Titanic or the Charge of the Light Brigade). Amundsen however, dispays all the qualities necessary for a polar explorer (or any leader). He was smart, adaptable, inventive, and organized. He did have some faults(somewhat unforgiving, vanity), but his results made him the greatest polar explorer of all time.His deeds included the Northwest Passage, 1st to winter in the Antarctic, Of course the South Pole, first to complete the Northeast and Northwest Passage, first to fly across the Arctic Ocean.He was a modern Viking, always seeking the unknown. It is somewhat baffling that he is not more recognized for his accomplishments.

It has been over 80 years and only now the truth about 2 different Antartic expeditions have come to light.We can finally see Capt. Robert Falcon Scott as the bumbling, incompetent that he was. For his lack of planning, his weakness towards animals, and his general lack of coming to terms with the enviromental conditions he would be experiencing caused the deaths of 4 of his team mates, and his own as well.But we also see Capt. Roald Amundsen as a hard, cold man. He wouldn't accept criticism of his ideas and concepts. He could never forget an insult, or deny a friendship.This book details the ups and downs in both expeditions. Giving the reader of being along side each of the groups, and trying to cope with the hardships that each group endured.

An excellent book. Being English I was raised on the myths surrounding Scott. This book exposed his shortcomings as an explorer and planner of an expedition. By contrast I was overwhelmed by Amundsen's lifelong committment to polar exploration. The lengths to which he went to make sure that he was as well prepared as possible contrasted sharply with the Brittish expedition. This book is well written and spurred my interest in the Antartic. The photographs and additional information such as the dietary allowances per man found at the back made it even more interesting that it's spectatcular subject matter.

Older children will enjoy reading the story because of the format Mr. Derby used. It'll make history come alive for them and educate them at the same time.

I found this book to be a fastinating fictional story of Robert Falcon Scott, written in today's language that children understand - the internet.

I have always believed that Mr. Scott deserved a more prominent place in history.

There are two important facts to remember about The Last Place on Earth. The first is that its author, Roland Huntford, comes to it with the clear agenda of debunking Scott and lionizing Amundsen. The second is that he has the benefit of more than fifty years of historical hindsight, which makes it easy for him to criticize Scott for apparent incompetence. He's also not above fabricating so-called "facts" if doing so helps him further his cause of tearing down the Scott legend (I'm thinking of his more or less unfounded allegations that Kathleen Scott had an affair with Nansen). The truth regarding Scott and Amundsen and their respective expeditions is naturally somewhat more complicated. The Last Place on Earth is not a bad book. It's not necessarily even bad history. But it is revisionist, and heavily skewed, written by a man with a clear agenda. If you want a more fair, balanced, and compassionate view, read Diana Preston's A First Rate Tragedy. Read the Scott chapters of Francis Spofford's I May Be Some Time. And read Scott's and Amundsen's own published records of the events. Because let's face it: nobody knows what really happened better than the men to whom it actually happened. And they left their own perfectly adequate accounts.

This book is a fascinating combination of detailed analysis of the two men, Scott and Amundsen and the wildly different tactics used to reach the Southernmost point on Earth. Although certain sections of the book drag with perhaps too much in-depth analysis (such as a detailed discussion of Amundsen's housekeeper's influence on his life) it moves along well overall.

The final days of Scott's party are laid out in a plain and factual way, but the terror that must have crept over them when they finally realized that there was no way they could reach their main base alive comes through remarkably well. You begin to feel the deep chill of the Antarctic wind and the crushing disappointment when a food depot is missed.

In contrast, the absolute ease of Amundsen's journey is shocking. His men used dogs to pull their sledges to the pole and then killed the weaker dogs on the return trip to feed the remaining team. Detailed planning for the journey, including learning to live in high latitudes from the experts, the Inuit, led to his success. Their skis carried them upwards of 20 miles per day with ease, despite the harsh environment. The team literally had a holiday while "boxing" the pole with flags during the several days used to confirm their position and ensure their place in history.

The pictures reproduced in the book do a good job of filling in the stark images the text roughs out for the reader. The amount of research required to produce this book is simply overwhelming and it should be considered the definitive text on this last great geographic race.

That is the theme of this gripping recreation/analysis of the great Scott/Amundson race to the South Pole. For decades Scott's fatal trek bestowed a posthumous immortality on him, while Amundson became a footnote, even though he was the winner. This book corrects this historical misjudgment. Basically Huntford states that Scott deserved to die--this is not his personal verdict but the verdict that the Pole itself cast upon Scott. He was poorly organized, his plans were vague,he was rigid in his views--he learned nothing from his first visit nor from the memoirs of those who also had made the visit, he was a poor leader of men and highly self-defensive. While Amundsen planned his campaign like Hitchcock made one of his movies: the whole thing was fully conceptualized in his mind down to the smallest detail before the first frame was taken; the journey itself was simply the materialization of the mind's idea. It is hard to feel much sympathy for Scott, and the author perhaps lets his disgust at his incompetence and the waste of life it caused color his presentation, but so well argued is this book that Scott is unlikely to rise again from the ashes Huntford has made of his reputation. This book is a classic, resurrecting one reputation and burying another, full of shrewd insights on men, leadership, climate and struggle. And it is a gripping, compelling page-turner to boot.

This book presents a fresh and reasoned assessment of Scott's first Antarctic expedition in its historical context. Engagingly written and well researched, its perspective casts an interesting light on aspects of Scott's first Antarctic expedition that have been passed over in general works on Scott in favor of the drama of the second expedition. The first expedition had ample drama of its own, and the author's take on such personalities as Clements Markham, Shackleton, and Scott himself is different enough from "standard received" to merit reading. I was particularly interested in the author's description of the interplay between Scott's orders as he received them and perceived them and subsequent criticism of the expedition for its failure to maximize the results obtained for the resources invested.

All in all, readable, informative, interesting, and well worth a read. You will find the point of view rather different from that so persuasively presented by Roland Huntford in his recently re-released "Scott and Amundsen," but partisanship -- if so strong a term may be used -- intrudes only occasionally, and then only in instances in which the author feels unfair misrepresentation may have done violence to the historical record.

I enjoyed this book!

Dr. Baughman continues to build on his reputation as America's preeminent polar historian in this book: Pilgrims on Ice (his first book on early Antartic exploration was Before the Heroes Came). This book focues on Robert Scott and the Discovery Expedition 1901 to 1904. By reading Dr. Baughman's work - one can see that this initial expedition laid the groundwork for the British expeditions of the following 21 years. In fact, the major players all played a part in this initial expedition. This voyage was Shackleton's first expedition to the South (serving as Scott's third officer). And I enjoyed the new insights Baughman provided into the young Shackleton, as well as the human details on expedition leader Scott and the rest of band. In its 250-odd pages of text, this becomes the first exhaustive account of the Discovery expedition 1901 to 1904 by a late 20th century polar historian. Baughman's extensive use of original documents in British and European archives brings fresh insight and more details on this heroic group then ever before available. I recommend this for lovers of travel, adventure, and biography.

I just saw a production of this play in Seattle, WA and was deeply moved. The play presents an emotional but balanced account of Scott's last expedition. The Amundsen character is especially interesting!

I saw the premiere stage presentation of this at the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles years ago, and have never forgotten the impact it made on me. Incredibly well written, and deeply moving. It's an amazing dramatic telling of Scott's final voyage in Antarctica.

I was so moved by this story I even named one of my companies after it.

The Scott Expedition of 1912 is documented by dozens if not hundreds of books. So why would a writer bother to take on the topic as Historical Fiction? In this case she had much more in mind that merely sharing the hypothetical viewpoints of Scott and 4 others who narrate their experiences. She uses the narrators sequentially as opposed to having them recount their opinions of the same event. There is some redundancy in opinions, but I really liked the way the narrative was a continual thread, and not a series of viewpoints on a redundant topic.

Ms. Bainbridge uses this tragedy of Scott to illustrate a turning point in History, a change in the fundamental beliefs and manner of approaching problems. The Scott Expedition serves as an example of the great changes during the very early 20th Century. The fact that Scott and his men failed to be the first, and that they all died, is either tragic or negligent when the fact that this was his second time out to plant the flag at the pole is considered. Not only is he beaten to his goal, his philosophies are proved to be the reason for his failure.

As with mountaineering these other attempts at, "firsts" were the domain of, "Class", and not necessarily ability. Those who lead, like Officers who had bought their Commissions were not necessarily qualified, and were often inept at that which they attempted foolishly and were risking their death and that of their men.

"Courage", was what would see a task through. A leaking ship before even leaving its berth was just a preview to the lack of planning and leadership that killed them all. Scott would not use dogs it must be a march. In this he was almost Victorian in his thinking. But then he brought motorized machines that not only were useless and in total opposition to his other ideas, it was also an indicator of how indecisive he was. His men followed him blindly as millions of others would follow, leaping out of trenches in WWI and charging the enemy. Forget the machine gun, for this was how it had always, "been done".

Money could get you on the ship just as a fee could get you guided up Mount Everest in 1996. The results were in some cases the same. Optimism and the willingness to risk one's life were based not on known competence in the leader and the soundness of the plan, rather whether people liked one another. The fact that a Scott team member was effectively blind did not mean he should be excluded. The climber on Everest who became blind for a time as the result of a cornea operation that reacted poorly to the low pressure of Everest was an eerie parallel.

When the story is placed in its Historical context the work is very well done. If it is read without a thought to the time during which the expedition took place, I can see why some would be less than thrilled with the book. However when read in perspective it is a wonderful book.

A wonderful tale of heroism and incompetence. Scott and his men are refugees from the Victorian era, still clinging to what were, by 1911, slightly outdated notions of heroism. We are in the dying years of the Empire, the last days of the era before telecommunications and airplanes made this sort of adventure almost impossible. Scott is a brave, loyal leader of his men, but he is a poor leader for such an expedition - he is alternately too stubborn and too indecisive. Scott is the book's most sympathetic figure, but also the most stupid as he leads four brave men to their deaths. If the expedition had been led by Oates, Bainbridge's cold, ruthless villain, one feels it might have had a happier ending - yet who would care about the men who came second if they had survived and lived to be 80? Bainbridge gets into the heads of these men and charts their mental and physical voyages from hope to their inevitable destiny in snowy graves. It is often easy to forget that we are reading the words of a woman born in the 1930s rather than the actual words of Wilson, Scott and the other men. Her feel for the extraordinary beauty and violence of the Antarctic is one of the books many strengths. As in her Titanic book Bainbridge paints a convincing picture of those few eventful years between the death of Victoria and the start of World War 1, when the world was overtaking the Empire and Britain and her citizens were struggling to assert themselves in quite the way they had in the previous century.

Her prose is economical and expressive to the point that other talented writers now strike me as using too many words. What's more, Bainbridge's imagination is stunning. Although I understood that I was reading a 'fictional' account of the failed Scott expedition, I kept finding myself thinking that I was there, witnessing what happened, peering over a shoulder as someone wrote in his journal...(!) She's that good. I'm a historian, and I find B's imagined re-creation of what happened on the Scott expedition (which is based on her expert command of the historical sources) completely convincing, and powerfully moving. What a genius!
Bravo, Bainbridge.

Scott of the Antarctic belongs in any complete collection of books on Antarctic exploration. It has a wealth of good, basic information on Scott's Discovery and Terra Nova expeditions.

But, having said that, the prospective reader must be warned that the book is a love letter to Scott, and has been utterly eclipsed by Roland Huntford's The Last Place on Earth, a far more scholarly and accurate account of the race to the South Pole.

A true classic of the genre, "Scott.."chronicles the exploration of the world's last frontier: the great polar ice caps. The reader is emersed in the expedition as the pair of explorers plod endlessly in the tractless permafrost, unaware of the gaping crevaces hidden beneath the snow, but painfully aware of the howling winds that pelt their faces with stinging ice, and numbing cold. This very well written book is indeed a fitting tribute to those intrepid scientists who brave hostile regions to further man's knowledge of the globe.

Huxley gives the background information on why and how the South Pole expedition of 1910 -1913 became a disaster. The author gives valuable information to understand the history of this endeavor and why Scott was chosen as a leader beginning in the 1880s. She gives an excellent insight on preparations of the expedition and Scott's rivalry with Shackleton. The analysis on why Scott chose ponies and motor sledges as auxillary means of transport over dogs is excellent. The mixture of amateurism and masochism that led to failure shown by the immense feeling of pride to do everything -especially man-hauling the sledges- the hard way has not been explained as well in any other book I have read on the subject. In the foreword the author states that Scott only became a hero because he died and led his four companions into death. After reading the book one can only wonder how muchbecoming a hero might have been a motive that led to self-destruction after having only been second to the Pole after Amundsen's Norwegian expedition.

Historian David Yelverton takes a long overdue look at Scott's Discovery expedition, the first significant attempt to probe the interior of that great southern continent. He pays great attention to Scott's difficulties in securing funds, crew, supplies and so forth. And, of course, Yelverton writes at length on the Discovery herself, an leaky craft that would have never made it south were it not for the constant struggle at the pumps. There is also a good deal on the cooperative effort with the Germans (!) on making often difficult magnetic observations, one of the principal reasons for the expedition in the first place.

This book is an absolute must for anyone interested in the history of the Antartic continent, Scott and, to a lesser degree, Shackleton. It is, without question, the most complete review of the Discovery expedition.

Although Scott's disaster in 1912 overshadows the Discovery effort, it could be said (and this is the point of "Unveiled") that there was much more meaningful work accomplished during this 1901-03 expedition.

Most readers will find "Unveiled" ponderous a times, although that is to be expected in a work of this depth and precision. I was disappointed with the occasional childish snipes at Roland Huntford's monumental "Last Place on Earth," a book that is a sore point with Scott's many fans. It's too bad that writers on Antarctic exploration feel as if they have to be one side of the fence or the other. Scott accomplished more than most other polar explorers -- but he also made many, many blunders.

But, in the main, "Antartic Unveiled" is worth looking into.

Recent writings on Antarctic exploration have not been kind to Scott's leadership. If you're interested in a different look at the man (to some degree) and the first (Discovery) expedition try this book. The author gives one a sense of life on the expedition and takes one along through daily life on the ship, over the winter and on the sledging journies. Heavy on detail and a bit too focused on 'righting the wrongs' of Huntford, etc., the result seems an extremely well-researched view of the scientific goals and results of the expedition. (And, perhaps the author can be forgiven for the emphasis on righting wrongs--previous works have certainly emphasized contrary views.) I've long felt that viewing the turn-of-the-century expeditions through today's 'lens' is problematic. Scott and the others were English men of their time and subject to those values, just as we are products of our time. I recommend the work to those interested in a detailed view of that first expedition, how its course affected the Terra Nova expedition, and a different view of the explorers and the expedition--placed in their time.

This is an insightful and well-researched biography. Using sources previously kept within the Oates family, including a collection of over three hundred of Captain Oates' letters and portions of his Antarctic diary, Sue Limb and P. Cordingly recreate many details of the explorer's life and experiences which had previously been unknown. The result is an account focusing on Oates' LIFE, rather than his famous DEATH after reaching the South Pole with Scott in 1912. Oates is shown to be not a sublime martyr, but instead an intelligent, remarkable man grounded in reality, whose life ended too soon as a result of the blunders of others.

This book was a very interesting true story of several British naval officers and their guides who travelled from Hudson Bay into the interior of Canada and up the Coppermine River to the northern coast of the North America. This expedition took several years. As their journey progressed so did the sufferings they endured. Several members of the group died of starvation and other causes. One was murdered and his killer was shot. It was incredible that anyone survived.

Anyone interested in the Arctic exploration and early Native Americans will enjoy this book. The author, Sir John Franklin, was a fearless explorer who died on a subsequent Arctic mission. He descibes his meetings with the traders and local inhabitants in great detail. He relied in large part on local Native Americans as guides and hunters. It was his intention to meet with the Eskimo people, who avoided all contact with his group. The Native Americans refused to accompany the group all the way north due to their fear of the Eskimos. I highly recommend this book.