Recommended Reading
BY MILBRY C. POLK
Faces of Exploration: Encounters with 50 Extraordinary Pioneers
by Joanna Vestey and Justin Marozzi.
212 pages. (London: Andre Deutsch Ltd.,
2006.) ISBN: 0233001999. $29
Photographer Joanna Vestey, calling on her long association with explorers and exploration, has created a lovely tribute to the life and work of today’s explorers in her book Faces of Exploration. The trailblazers she has chosen are well known in exploration fields and are celebrated members of exploring organizations. The Explorers Club members include Buzz Aldrin, Sylvia Earle, Storey Musgrove,Wade Davis; The Royal Geographical Society members include Sir Wally Herbert, Sir Wilfred Thesiger, Robin Hanbury-Tenison;Wings WorldQuest Awardees include Meenakshi Wadhwa,Marie Tharp, Rosita Arvigo, Anna Roosevelt; and still some represent all three organizations. These individuals have plumbed the oceans, climbed mountains, crossed deserts, sailed the oceans, floated over the earth, and explored space, all the while making important contributions to our understanding of life on earth. Justin Marozzi’s profiles not only review their accomplishments but also evoke the spirit of these inspiring individuals.
In her introduction,Vestey says she chose these particular explorers because “each of them speaks to the inquiring urge and the instinct to discover fresh horizons that lie within us all and make us human.”And in their foreword, Shane and Nigel Winser express the importance of these modern explorers, noting, “The role of the explorer as communicator should never be underestimated. It is that ability to tell the story that can change people’s understanding of the world.”Vestey’s expressive black-and-white portraits of the explorers combined with brief overviews of their incredible discoveries make this an important book for every exploration bookshelf, one that is sure to inspire the dreamer in all of us.
The Pathfinders: A Global History of Exploration
by Felipe Fernandez-Armesto. 428 pages.
(New York: W.W. Norton, 2006.) ISBN:
0393062597. $27.95
Felipe Fernandez-Armesto—historian, author, and professor, formerly of Oxford and London, now at Tufts University— has written a fascinating chronology of world exploration over millennia, beginning with the migrations of Homo erectus and up to today. His book paints exploration as one of the driving forces of humanity.His focus, he states, “is about encounters—encounters between cultures—and the outreach of ambitions, imaginations, efforts and innovations that made them possible.” Fernandez- Armesto moves around the world, across cultures, and through time, examining the major exploration endeavors in a highly informative and thoughtful manner, while his ample use of maps and images enlivens the text. The titles of his chapters illuminate the spirit of the ages they discuss: Stretching, Reaching, Stirring, Springing, Vaulting, Girdling, Connecting, Deepening, Globalizing. While he ends on the note that traditional exploration on Earth is over—blanks on the world maps have been filled in, and cameras and robots lead the way, robbing contemporary explorers of the thrill of the unknown— a new age of exploration is dawning. The oceans, biosphere, and space await us: vast unknown realms that, like the earth itself, are ever changing.
Jane Goodall: The Woman
Who Redefined Man
by Dale Peterson. 740 pages. (New York:
Houghton Mifflin, 2006.)
ISBN: 0395854059. $35
Dale Peterson, long an associate of celebrated primatologist Jane Goodall, has written an intimate tribute to the woman who arguably has done more than any other individual to help us understand our relationship with and responsibility to other species on Earth.Award-winning writer Peterson co-authored Visions of Caliban with Goodall and edited two volumes of her letters.
Jane Goodall, born and raised in England, from a young age showed a particular affinity for animals, a love encouraged by her mother,Vanne, who did not mind the menagerie of snails, worms, insects, birds, and other animals Jane nurtured in their home. The story of Goodall’s rapid assent into the world of animal behavior has become legend. Trained as a secretary and on vacation in Kenya, she came to the attention of famed archaeologist Louis Leakey. He believed that long-term studies of our primate cousins would shed light on the lives and behavior of our earliest human ancestors. Recognizing in the young Goodall the qualities he sought in a researcher, Leakey sent her, with her mother as chaperone, into the forests of Gombe, Tanzania, on the shores of Lake Tanganyika. She succeeded beyond his wildest expectations, discovering through the years of observing chimpanzees in the wild that they had a complex, intelligent society with many of the hallmarks we had hitherto believed to be uniquely human (hence the subtitle, Woman Who Redefined Man).
Peterson delves into the personal life of Goodall, her loves, her marriages, her family, and her wide network of friends. On par with the personal story is her life work first studying chimpanzees— which grew to include helping chimps used for medical testing have a better life—and her more recent work through the Jane Goodall Institute to build bridges between humans, animals, and the planet. Goodall comes across as a woman of charm, grace, and tremendous charisma, whose mere presence is on par with that of a rock star, but one with a mission and a message. The book is unfinished because Goodall is still very active, traveling most of the year lecturing and promoting program “Roots and Shoots.”
Finding Amelia: The True Story of
the Earhart Disappearance
by Ric Gillespie. 276 pages with DVD.
(Maryland: Naval Institute Press, 2006.)
ISBN: 1591143195. $28.95
Amelia Earhart, an icon during her lifetime for her daring aviation feats and her personal charm, has remained a mystery since her disappearance with her navigator Fred Noonan over the Pacific more than 70 years ago. The mystery has only compounded over the years as new aspects of her secret work for the U.S. government have been revealed, provocative accounts of Earhart sightings rom China to Japan and to various oceanic islands have been discovered, and the truth about events occurring during and after the initial search have come to light. Ric Gillespie, Director of the International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery (TIGHAR) who has ledeight search expeditions to the Pacific and is a noted Earhart authority, has written this exhaustive new book about the mystery. Gillespie has added an important bonus to his book, a DVD that contains many of the documents, logbooks, reports, and technical studies his research has uncovered so everyone can examine the evidence. Gillespie comes to his own persuasive conclusion about the fate of Earhart and Noonan; it’s up to the reader to decide if he has indeed solved the mystery.
The Frozen Ship: The Histories and Tales of Polar Exploration
by Sarah Moss. 244 pages. (New York:
BlueBridge, 2006.) ISBN: 1933346035.
$24.95
Sarah Moss, a lecturer at Kent University, opens The Frozen Ship with George Powell Thomas’s 1847 account of a Captain Warren encountering a ghost ship, complete with its long-frozen occupants. This passage sets the stage for what is the latest addition to the avalanche of books on the Poles in anticipation of the International Polar Year (2007).Moss’s book tells selected stories of northern exploration and colonization with an emphasis on the books, letters, and journals of the explorers who made their mark there. (For a comprehensive overview of this subject, see the Stamms’ Books on Ice, reviewed in the Fall 2006 Explorers Journal.)
Moss begins with a brief history of Arctic exploration; subsequent chapters focus on Norse colonists and the question of their disappearance in Greenland, including Nansen, Scott, Greeley, and others.Moss observes the peculiar obsession Europeans have had with doomed Polar expeditions and the quest to find the lost. This fascination continues to this day in the Arctic. The example she discusses is John Geiger’s book Frozen in Time, about the excavation of the sailors from Franklin’s expedition. Unusual for most books on Arctic history,Moss’s includes a chapter on a few women who wrote letters or books about their experiences, including Isobel Hutchison, who traveled in Greenland, and Jennie Darlington, who honeymooned in Antarctica.Moss closes with a discussion of Arctic imagery prevalent in poetry, literature, and chil-dren’s books, but it’s her inclusion of the lesser-known Polar stories that makes this book an important contribution to Polar literature.
The Art of Rough Travel: From the Peculiar to the Practical, Advice
from a 19th Century Explorer
by Sir Francis Galton. 176 pages. (Seattle:
Mountaineers Books, 2006.) ISBN: 1594850585. $15.95
Sir Francis Galton was a cousin of Charles Darwin, a Victorian gentleman explorer of Namibia, and a scientific enthusiast who made contributions to forensics, meteorology, geography, and other sciences in his 20 books, including the classic The Art of Rough Travel. The book is brimming with sound advice as well as bizarre and amusing anecdotes Galton gleaned from his own voyages as well as nuggets culled from his fellows at The Royal Geographical Society and from historical figures.
Galton’s peculiar solutions to quandaries in the field may have seemed more normal 150 years ago. For warmth, he suggests taking along a good warm dressing gown for the evening campfire or in a pinch a slather of dirt and grease will do. For travel, Galton lists the various types of floatation devices then in use around the world, from gourds to raft trays made of smoked animal skin. He lists the beasts of burden used in travel and provides a helpful chart that shows how much each can carry (an elephant carries a whopping 500 pounds). For sustenance, Galton discusses how to find water; it might be handy one day to know there is a bit stored in the pericardia of turtles. In the section on food, he describes various types of camp ovens, how to make them from scratch, and how and what to cook in them.He also includes some novel ways to hunt animals; for example, to catch a wolf, douse fulminating powder in a raw shank bone so when the wolf bites down, his head blows off. Galton even discusses what to do if you are desperate enough to find and eat carrion: who knew that the rankness of dead fowl is often in the skin? Thus the bird should be skinned rather than plucked, and if the body is really bad, simply bury it in earth for a few hours and the foul oil will be
absorbed in the dirt.
The Atlas of Climate Change: Mapping the World’s Greatest Challenge
by Kirstin Dow and Thomas E. Downing. Foreword by Bo Kjellen. 112 pages, paperback. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006.) ISBN: 0520250230. $19.95
The Atlas of Climate Change is a powerful, clear, and concise look at the full extent of challenges we all face today in our rapidly changing environment. The authors, Kirstin Dow, professor of geography, contributor to the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, and principal investigator for National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and Thomas E. Downing, professor at Oxford University and director of Stockholm Environmental Institute, speak with authority on the issues of climate and the significance of its changing nature. Through ample use of maps, they present a synthesis of decades of scientific data. The seven short sections of the book cover the whole array of the climate debate. Beginning with signs of climate change, including Polar melts and weather extremes, the authors move on to assess the causes of change, including industrial emissions, agricultural runoff, carbon imbalance, and the greenhouse effect. Most sobering is their assessment of how climate change will affect populations around the world. As sea levels rise owing to Polar melt, millions of people will be displaced inland.Water— the lack of fresh water combined with the rising sea levels—will become the critical defining issue of our century. The effects of climate change will be profound, and we are unprepared. The last sections of the book offer hope in outlining the various actions that can be taken, from international efforts such as the Kyoto Protocol to specific measures individuals can take. This important book should be required reading for everyone.
The Oracle: The Lost Secrets and Hidden Messages of Ancient Delphi
by William J. Broad. 320 pages. (New York: Penguin Press, 2006.) ISBN: 1594200815. $25.95
One of the most influential voices in the classical world was that of the “sisterhood of Mystics,” an order of priestesses ensconced in the sacred grove of Delphi in Greece. These mystics served as the voice of God Apollo, whose word was religiously followed by individuals and governments alike in Greece and beyond.Many accounts of the Oracle and the prophecies they dispensed have survived the millennia.William Broad, Pulitzer Prize-winning author and New York Times science reporter, delves into the fascinating history of the Oracle, examining the science of the site and the role of religion in shaping history.
Ancient accounts described vapors rising from the floor of the cave that sent the priestesses into a trance. In the 1890s, French archaeologists uncovered the ancient temple and cave but never found the chasm to which the priestesses allegedly retreated in order to communicate with Apollo, nor did they discover evidence of vapors, thereby discrediting the ancient accounts. Broad follows the work of modern-day scientists as they trace the ancient accounts using modern archaeological and geological evidence to explain and understand the power of the ancient seers. Their most interesting finding is that there was indeed a vapor escaping from the earth at the Oracle site, and that vapor was a hallucinogenic gas. Broad argues that the power of the Oracle is still with us in ways that challenge notions of rational science by raising the question of events still beyond scientific explanation.