Max Jones is Senior Lecturer in Modern History at The University of Manchester and author of The Last Great Quest: Captain Scott's Antarctic Sacrifice.In 2003 he named his top ten books about exploration for the Guardian. One title on the list:
The Worst Journey in the World by Apsley Cherry-Garrard (1922)Read about the other entries on the list.
The title of Cherry-Garrard's account of Scott's last Antarctic expedition refers not to the polar journey, but to the trek he endured with Edward Wilson and Henry Bowers in searchof the eggs of the emperor penguin. The three men barely survived the first journey ever attempted during an Antarctic winter, experiencing temperatures as low as -77.5ºF (-25.3ºC), only to die only a few months later. Mourning for his lost friends, disillusioned by war and assisted by his neighbour George Bernard Shaw, Cherry-Garrard composed a work which transcends the confines of the expedition to offer a powerful meditation on the nature of exploration and intellectual curiosity in the modern world.
The Worst Journey in the World is on the Barnes & Noble Review's list of five top books on navigators, Ian Marchant's top ten list of books of the night, and the Barnes & Noble Review's list of five books on winter.
--Marshal Zeringue
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