From the author of Ninety Degrees North, a spellbinding account of how officers of the British Navy explored the world after the Napoleonic Wars.In 1816, John Barrow, second secretary to the British admiralty, launched the most ambitious program of exploration the world has ever seen. For the next thirty years, his handpicked teams of elite British naval officers scoured the globe from the Arctic to Antarctica, their mission: to fill the blanks that litter...

The author of Barrow's Boys offers a fascinating look at the exploration of the Arctic in the nineteenth century.Named a Best Book of the Year by the New York Times Book Review, the Seattle Times, Publishers Weekly, and TimeIn the nineteenth century, theories about the North Pole ran rampant. Was it an open sea? Was it a portal to new worlds within the globe? Or was it just a wilderness of ice? When Sir John Fr...

"[A] searing story of France's attempt to colonize the vast Sahara desert and of two unforgettable men who dedicated their lives to the effort." —Rob Mitchell, The Boston HeraldWhether writing of the Alps, the high seas, or the North Pole, Fergus Fleming has won acclaim as one of today's most vivid and engaging historians of adventure and exploration. The Sword and the Cross takes us to the Sahara at the end of the nineteenth cen...

A "dramatic and masterful" account of early alpine explorers and the challenges they faced to scale the summits (Anthony Brandt, National Geographic Adventure).In a riveting narrative of daredevils and eccentrics, Fergus Fleming gives us the breathtaking story of some of history's greatest explorers as they conquer the soaring peaks of the Alps. Fleming recounts the incredible exploits of the men whose centuries-old fear of the mountain range turned quickl...

As war clouds darkened over Europe in 1914, a party led by Shackleton set out to make the first crossing of the entire Antarctic continent via the Pole. But their initial optimism was short-lived as ice floes closed around their ship, gradually crushing it and marooning 28 men on the polar ice. Alone in the world's most unforgiving environment, Shackleton and his team began a brutal quest for survival. And as the story of their journey across treacherous seas and a wilderness of glaciers a...

On August 16, 1952, Ian Fleming wrote to his wife, Ann, "My love, This is only a tiny letter to try out my new typewriter and to see if it will write golden words since it is made of gold." He had bought the golden typewriter as a present to himself for finishing his first novel, Casino Royale. It marked in glamorous style the arrival of James Bond, agent 007, and the start of a career that saw Fleming become one the world's most celebrated thriller-writers. And he did write golde...

Readers can explore James Bond creator Ian Fleming’s writing on the pleasures of drinking and mix themselves fifty delicious cocktails from recipes inspired by his books and developed by award-winning London bar, Swift.Both Bond and Fleming were partial to a stiff drink. In both fiction and real life, cocktails were an important and well-chosen accompaniment to adventure and daring and often relaxing. Fleming made the Martini famous with Bond’s ritual of always ordering it “shaken,...

The golden moments of exploration and adventure - glorious, triumphant, perilous and dramatic.In the 18th century, exploration entered a new dimension - explorers were motivated by scientific inquiry rather than greed. To this end they were expected to make a full record of everything they encountered; and for the first time in history, that record was to include pictures as well as words. Combining gripping first-hand accounts with original images, THE EXPLORER'S ...

The remarkable story of Gudrid, the female explorer who sailed from Iceland to the New World a millennium ago.Five hundred years before Columbus, a Viking woman named Gudrid sailed off the edge of the known world. She landed in the New World and lived there for three years, giving birth to a baby before sailing home. Or so the Icelandic sagas say. Even after archaeologists found a Viking longhouse in Newfoundland, no one believed that the details of Gudrid's story ...

The rise and fall of William Mulholland, and the story of L.A.'s disastrous dam collapse: " A dramatic saga of ambition, politics, money and betrayal" ( Los Angeles Daily News).Rivers in the Desert follows the remarkable career of William Mulholland, the visionary who engineered the rise of Los Angeles as the greatest American city west of the Mississippi. He sought to transform the sparse and barren desert into an inhabitable env...

The English king's epic escape from his own country is thrillingly recounted in this authoritative history.Though the Parliament of Scotland proclaimed him king in 1649, Charles II faced a formidable enemy in England. His attempt to reclaim the throne ended in defeat at the Battle of Worcester—and thus began the battle to save his own life.Pursued wherever he went by soldiers from the conflict as well as local militia, Charles donned peasant clothing, crudely...

"Does for the Civil War period what Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States did for the study of American history in general." — Library JournalHistorian David Williams has written the first account of the American Civil War as viewed though the eyes of ordinary people—foot soldiers, slaves, women, prisoners of war, draft resisters, Native Americans, and others. Richly illustrated with little-known anecdotes and firsthand testimony, ...