From Publishers Weekly
Whybrow shows up today's "extreme" adventurers in this hefty collection of 19th-century narratives. Before corporate sponsorship, before helicopter rescues, even before Sir Ernest Shackleton's famous voyage, people who explored the wilderness found endless wonder and danger. "Risk," Whybrow observes, "hardly had to be sought; it was part of the package." The years between 1800 and 1900 were unmatched for sheer exploratory guts and glory as exhibited by Europeans of a certain gender and race; this was the century when men were men, women were women and people of color were "the blacks." Each one of these 32 captivating narratives (grouped by theme into three sections) packs a big emotional punch, whether it's a horrifying tale of starvation and injury or an awestruck description of natural wonders. "Voyages of Discovery" highlights sponsored quests for worldly knowledge: Meriwether Lewis runs from a bear on the Missouri River, and John Wesley Powell runs the Grand Canyon's rapids. In "Personal Odysseys," Richard Henry Dana, Jr.'s well-known sea journey and Mrs. Alfred "Mary" Mummery's proto-feminist alpine expedition join the voyages of other passionate explorers seeking adventure on land and sea. "Lifelong Quests" features excerpts from the lives of obsessive explorers such as John Muir, Isabella Bird and Sven Hedin, the Swedish geographer whose 1899 attempt to reach Lhasa prompted him to write, "we had tasted the enchantment of the great adventure as never before." 30 illustrations
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Booklist
This anthology collects 35 examples of first-rate adventure writing from the nineteenth century, including excerpts from the Lewis and Clark journals, Mark Twain's Roughing It, and Norwegian Fridtjof Nansen's classic Farthest North. Editor Whybrow has culled accounts of journeys undertaken for personal, philosophical, or business reasons. She evinces an acute perception of the dramatic: quite a few of her choices involve narrow escapes from death, such as George Kennan's white-knuckler about his near shipwreck in the Sea of Okhotsk or alpinist Edward Whymper's tumble down the Matterhorn. Whybrow also picked several mountaineering stories by women and two by harbingers of the philosophy that nature was to be communed with rather than conquered: Henry David Thoreau (ruminating about Maine) and John Muir (ditto about Alaska). Such variety promises something to please every shade of taste for armchair adventure. Gilbert Taylor
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
