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Old 04-02-2019, 12:49 AM   #3
gmw
cacoethes scribendi
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I cannot ignore the coincidences (here you are looking for journeys, I bought the following book on special just a few days ago, and I see that fantasyfan recently put up a positive review on the "What are we reading?" thread), so feel that I must nominate:

Erebus: The Story of a Ship by Michael Palin. Goodreads 334 pages, 2018.
Quote:
In his major new work, Michael Palin – former Monty Python stalwart and much-loved television globe-trotter – brings to life the world and voyages of HMS Erebus, from its construction in the naval dockyards of Pembroke, to the part it played in Ross’s Antarctic expedition of 1839–43, to its abandonment during Franklin’s ill-fated Arctic expedition, and to its final rediscovery on the seabed in Queen Maud Gulf in 2014. He explores the intertwined careers of the men who shared its journeys: the organisational genius James Clark Ross, who mapped much of the Antarctic coastline and oversaw some of the earliest scientific experiments to be conducted there; and the troubled Sir John Franklin, who, at the age of 60 and after a chequered career, commanded the ship on its final journey. And he describes what life on board was like for the dozens of men who stepped ashore in Antarctica’s Victoria Land, and for the officers and crew who, one by one, froze and starved to death in the Arctic wastes as rescue missions desperately tried to track them down.

To help tell the story, he has travelled to various locations across the world – Tasmania, the Falklands, the Canadian Arctic – to search for local information, and to experience at first hand the terrain and the conditions that would have confronted the Erebus and her crew.

Illustrated with maps, paintings and engravings, this is a wonderfully evocative and epic account, written by a master explorer and storyteller.
Note that the epub is something like 67MB thanks to the embedded images. Each chapter has a black and white image prefix - these display quite well on an e-ink reader. But then there is a "picture section" chapter at the back that includes many colour images; this is very slow to load but did eventually load and show quite well (but not perfectly) on my Kobo H2O. (I haven't actually read the book yet, I just checked out how it was going to work before nominating.)

Last edited by gmw; 04-02-2019 at 12:53 AM.
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