A renowned marine biologist presents this extraordinary firsthand account of the discovery of Ernest Shackleton's Endurance--a century to the day after Shackleton's death--that captures the intrepid spirit that joins two mariners across the centuries, both of whom accomplished the impossible.

This book retraces the voyages of Captain James Cook, the Yorkshire farm boy who drew the map of the modern world. Captain James Cook's three epic journeys in the eighteenth century were the last great voyages of discovery. His ships sailed 150,000 miles, from the Arctic to the Antarctic, from Tasmania to Oregon, from Easter Island to Siberia. When Cook set off for the Pacific in 1768, a third of the globe remained blank. By the time of his violent...

"The Aeronauts is the true story behind the forthcoming Major Motion Picture of the death-defying adventures of pioneering Victorian balloonist and scientist James Glaisher. In 1862, ambitious scientist James Glaisher set out to do the impossible: ascend higher into the skies than ever before to establish his ground-breaking research. Glaisher's death-defying journey forms the story of the forthcoming Major Motion Picture The Aeronauts, starring Eddie...

"This is the world of the submariner. This is life under pressure. What's it like to spend three months without sunlight, sharing what little space you have with over a hundred fellow crewmen and more firepower than all the bombs dropped in World War II combined? As a restless and adventurous eighteen-year-old, Richard Humphreys joined the Royal Navy submarine service. For five years during the Cold War, he served on the nuclear sub HMS Resolution....

The sensational true story of Eddie Rickenbacker, America's greatest flying ace, who above all the rest showed a nation the way forward in its quest for speed, endurance and courage.

On February 20, 1962, John Glenn became a national star. That morning at Cape Canaveral, the small-town boy from Ohio took his place atop a. rocket and soared into space. . . He became celebrated in all corners of the world as not just the first American to orbit the Earth, but as the first space traveler to take the human race with him. Refusing to let that dramatic day define his life, he went on to become a four-term US senator, and returned to...

Colonel Cody and the Flying Cathedral is the fascinating and bizarre history of Samuel Franklin Cody, who in his early years worked the same cattle trails as Buffalo Bill and played the same Dodge City roulette tables as Wyatt Earp. But later his life took a startling turn. While performing in England, Cody became a passionate kite-builder and flyer, and at the apex of his career, fashioned a vast airplane dubbed "The Flying Cathedral,"

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"In 1993, U.S. women earned the right to fly in combat, but the full story of how it happened is largely unknown. From the first women in the military in World War II to the final push in the 1990s, The Fly Girls Revolt chronicles the actions of a band of women who overcame decades of discrimination and prevailed against bureaucrats, chauvinists, anti-feminists, and even other military women. Drawing on extensive research, interviews with women who...

"Black Tulip is the dramatic story of history's top fighter ace, Luftwaffe pilot Erich Hartmann. It's also the story of how his service under Hitler was simplified and elevated to Western mythology during the Cold War. Over 1,404 wartime missions, Hartmann claimed a staggering 352 airborne kills, and his career contains all the dramas you would expect. There were the frostbitten fighter sweeps over the Eastern Front, drunken forays to Hitler's Eagle's...

Only days after the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, President Roosevelt tapped Chester W. Nimitz to assume command of the Pacific Fleet. From the early years of the war to the surrender ceremony on Tokyo Bay four years later, Nimitz carried the expectations of a nation impatient for revenge-- and transformed the devastated Pacific fleet into the most powerful and commanding naval force in history. Symonds covers all the major campaigns, and captures...