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Books > Earth & environment > Geography > Geographical discovery & exploration
For 250 years the Bryan Rostron’s family spread across the globe, helping to expand the British Empire and paint the map red. This is a personal reckoning with that dubious legacy, echoing down to the present in South Africa.
It begins with the ‘discovery’ of Tahiti in 1767 by an ancestor, from whose log book Rostron reveals that his sailors were exchanging the ship’s nails for sex with Tahitian maidens so that HMS Dolphin began, literally, to fall apart.
After the Anglo-Boer war, having emigrated to South Africa, one grandfather became editor of the Sunday Times, voicing racist opinions, and later of the Rand Daily Mail, at that time a voice of the Randlords. Ironically, his other grandfather worked for the Communist Party and printed revolutionary pamphlets for the violent 1922 Rand Revolt. In a bizarre twist, Rostron’s father managed the 1936 South African boxing team at
the Berlin Olympics, where from under his nose their star boxer was recruited by the Nazis.
Uncovering family secrets and mistaken myths, Rostron offers a unique insight into modern-day South Africa’s colonial past.
If the United States couldn't catch up to the Soviets in space, how
could it compete with them on Earth? That was the question facing
John F. Kennedy at the height of the Cold War-a perilous time when
the Soviet Union built the wall in Berlin, tested nuclear bombs
more destructive than any in history, and beat the United States to
every major milestone in space. The race to the heavens seemed a
race for survival-and America was losing. On February 20, 1962,
when John Glenn blasted into orbit aboard Friendship 7, his mission
was not only to circle the planet; it was to calm the fears of the
free world and renew America's sense of self-belief. Mercury Rising
re-creates the tension and excitement of a flight that shifted the
momentum of the space race and put the United States on the path to
the moon. Drawing on new archival sources, personal interviews, and
previously unpublished notes by Glenn himself, Mercury Rising
reveals how the astronaut's heroics lifted the nation's hopes in
what Kennedy called the "hour of maximum danger."
Dick Isherwood learnt his craft in the 1960s in the competitive
melee of the Cambridge University Mountaineering Club. His
enthusiasm meant he took every opportunity to gain more experience
on steep rock - dry, grotty or wet - but by 1964 he was already
looking to wider horizons and joined Henry Day's "Cambridge Chitral
Expedition". By 1969 he had become one of the top rock climbers in
the UK, repeating many of the hardest routes and putting up a few
new ones in North Wales, the Lakes and Scotland. A job move to the
Far East then enabled him to concentrate on his passion for small
alpine-type expeditions, much in the style of Shipton and Tilman.
One example was his audacious two-man attempt on Annapurna II
(7937m). But not all trips were to the Himalaya - he climbed the
Carstensz Pyramide (4884m) in New Guinea - one of the "Seven
Summits" - by a new route and rounded off the trip with an epic
solo ascent of Sunday Peak. He finally "settled down" in 1999 in
Port Townsend, Washington and whilst still mountaineering, became
an accomplished sailor, frequently taking himself off on long solo
trips in his sea kayak or sailing boat around the north Pacific
coast. A blogger recently wrote "Everyone had a Dick Isherwood
story". This anthology tells many as described in his writings and
those of his friends. They illustrate some of his extraordinary
adventures over more than 50 years.
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