SPIRIT OF ENDURANCE

Here Armstrong, author of the award-winning Shipwreck at the Bottom of the World: Shackleton’s Amazing Voyage (1998) captains an oversized, picture-story version, matching an economical retelling of the ill-fated expedition’s course to a grand array of maps, journal pages, and dramatic documentary photos. This is capped by Maughan’s even more dramatic paintings as, working on canvas, the artist depicts small, exhausted-looking human figures struggling through huge, dim, utterly inhospitable Antarctic land- and seascapes. Even more than Michael McCurdy’s Trapped by the Ice! Shackleton’s Amazing Antarctic Adventure (1997), this will have young readers marveling that anyone could survive such conditions, and will leave them appreciating that even failure can be glorious. (Shackleton meant to cross the continent, but never even reached the mainland before the ice crushed his ship.) The expedition’s trek, through some of the worst weather in the world to a place where rescue could reach them, makes compelling reading at any length. (timeline, index, crew list, brief list of further resources) (Nonfiction, 9-11)