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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.
The extraordinary story of how the Endurance, Sir Ernest
Shackleton's ship, was found in the most hostile sea on Earth in
2022 On 21 November 1915, Sir Ernest Shackleton's ship, Endurance,
finally succumbed to the crushing ice. Its crew watched in silence
as the stern rose twenty feet in the air and then, it was gone. The
miraculous escape and survival of all 28 men on board have entered
legend. And yet, the iconic ship that bore them to the brink of the
Antarctic was considered forever lost. A century later, an
audacious plan to locate the ship was hatched. The Ship Beneath the
Ice gives a blow-by-blow account of the two epic expeditions to
find the Endurance. As with Shackleton's own story, the voyages
were filled with intense drama and teamwork under pressure. In
March 2022, the Endurance was finally found to headlines all over
the world. Written by Mensun Bound, the Director of Exploration on
both expeditions, this captivating narrative includes countless
fascinating stories of Shackleton and his legendary ship. Complete
with a selection of Frank Hurley's photos from Shackleton's
original voyage in 1914-17, as well as from the expeditions in 2019
and 2022, The Ship Beneath the Ice is the perfect tribute to this
monumental discovery.
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."
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