Mawson's Will: The Greatest Polar Survival Story Ever Written Review

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(More customer reviews)This slim volume details the plight of the Antarctic expedition of the Australian explorer Douglas Mawson in 1911. Seemingly few people are aware of this particular foray into the polar south, as the Scott tragedy looms largest in the public consciousness and there is a new vogue for the remarkable exploits of Ernest Shackleton in this same time frame. However, this is a story worth telling.
For those who are not obsessively interested in accounts of polar exploration, this books serves as a good introduction to the genre. It's almost novelistic in its easy yet vivid narrative flow, and unlike more encylopedic works, it avoids getting bogged down in excessive side treks about rival explorers or earlier achievements in the mapping and scouting of the continent.
Even so, it has a glaring weakness in its lack of footnotes or a bibliography. Bickel recounts entire conversations verbatim and even details the thoughts of several individuals, all without documenting the sources for such material. Since some of the quoted individuals died on the journey, one can only assume that the author is drawing from their expedition journals, and yet there is only a vague allusion to this in the afterword. More annoyingly, Bickel describes the immediate events preceding the death of one of the men from the point of view of the soon-to-be-deceased explorer, even though his two surviving comrades weren't even eyewitnesses to the moment of the tragedy. This gives rise to the suspicion that poetic license may have been somewhat abused in the composition of this book.
There are a number of photos of expedition members, their ship, and their camp. Sadly, no map is provided, making it difficult for the reader to follow Mawson's progress.
Bickel certainly does good work in shedding some light on this little known expedition, especially on the causes of the death of the second explorer. But the lack of notation of sources is a serious drawback.

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Australian Sir Douglas Mawson chose not to go with Robert Scott to the South Pole in 1911, but instead set out on a less prestigious expedition to chart Antarctica's coastline. Mawson was not inexperienced - in 1908 he had led an important expedition to the South Magnetic Pole - but nothing could have prepared him for what happened on this trek. Mawson's task was to chart 1,500 miles of coastline and claim it for the British crown. Setting out in a party of three, he faced mountains, crevasse-filled glaciers, and 60-mile-per-hour winds. Six weeks and 320 miles out, one man fell into a crevasse, along with the tent, most equipment, and all but a week's supply of food. After losing his other companion and the dogs, Mawson fought his way back home alone through horrific wind, snow, and cold to leave his own mark in history.

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Dark Winter Review

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(More customer reviews)Agatha Christie took ten people off to a remote location for a weekend, and they started to die, one by one. William Dietrich isolates twenty-six people at the South Pole for several months, and guess what? "Ten Little Indians" happens to twenty-six ice- and dark-bound South Pole residents. (There are no penguins at the Pole; they are at the ocean hundreds of miles away.) Jed Lewis is a geologist turned meteorologist assigned as a last minute replacement to the team that will "winter-over" at the Amundsen-Scott Base at the South Pole. When the plane that bought Jed leaves, along with the last of the "summer people", the twenty-six remaining scientists and support staff are stranded-there will be no way in or out over the long, perpetually dark winter. (The very real April, 2001 evacuation of a critically ill doctor from Amundsen-Scott by a heroic small plane flight from McMurdo base emphasizes he isolation of the characters in the book.) Jed is actually a sort of secret agent. After becoming disenchanted with his work with "big oil" in secretly surveying the Alaskan nature reserves for oil deposits, he is looking for a new job. He meets a scientist who is working on global warming and needs data from the South Pole winter; but the technician who was going to winter over and collect data for him has canceled. It also seems that the top scientist at the Pole has found a rock buried deep in the ice. Since there are no rocks at the Pole, this must be a meteorite, but it is not the typical metallic rock. The find must be kept secret, because it could be very valuable-scientifically and commercially. Since Jed is a geologist, he can do the preliminary evaluation over the winter while collecting climate data. Meanwhile, he will have several months to consider his life and his options. In an almost foreseeable fashion, the plot begins to twist and turn when the rock disappears and then its finder is found dead. Clue after clue points toward Jed, who is the new guy and suspicious anyway-why was a geologist sent down to do climate research? There is romance, and there is skulduggery. The story is told well and the reader feels the isolation and fear as everyone seeks to find an easy answer to calm their terrors. Even if many parts of the plot are anticipated, the story is interesting-after all, Agatha Christie was not all that original in her stories, and they are still classics.

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The Hollow Earth: The Greatest Geographical Discovery in History Made by Admiral Richard E. Byrd in the Mysterious Land Beyond the Poles- The True Origin of the Flying Saucers Review

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(More customer reviews)The story is based on early 1900's exploration and research and must have been interesting and even plausable at that time. In a modern world of satelites, etc. the tale is in need of recent supporting evidence, which of course, doesn't exist.

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