Dead Reckoning: Tales of the Great Explorers, 1800-1900

Richard Burton makes a forbidden pilgrimage to Mecca; Mary Kingsley wanders alone in the jungles of West Africa; Fridtjof Nansen tries to walk to the North Pole; Mary Mummery describes a harrowing first ascent in the Alps; Francis Parkman hunts buffalo with the Sioux in the Black Hills. This remarkable collection contains stories from the most compelling and celebrated odysseys of the century, some of them long-forgotten classics of their time. From polar navigation to the search for the source of the Nile to the first crossing of the Himalayas to a quest for the origin of species, this book ranges the globe and captures the restlessness of the human spirit. "What emerges again and again in the writings Whybrow has compiled are not the ways in which an explorer destroys or inflates or distorts but the ways an explorer comes to see." Edward Rothstein, New York Times

Author: Helen Whybrow
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Published: 03/01/2005
Pages: 566
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 1.07lbs
Size: 8.44h x 5.52w x 1.03d
ISBN: 9780393326536

Review Citation(s):
Ingram Advance 02/01/2005 pg. 74

About the Author
Whybrow, Helen: - Helen Whybrow lives in Waitsfield, Vermont. Her other collections include Our Land, Ourselves: Readings on People and Place.