The review recommends Caroline Alexander's illustrated account of Shackleton's expedition and singles out its closing chapters. The returning party had spent nearly two years out of contact and initially asked whether the war was over. Newspapers and mail confronted them with trench warfare, the Lusitania, poison gas, submarine warfare, Gallipoli, and casualties on a scale they had been unable to imagine. Their survival in Antarctica ended with the discovery that the political and moral world they had left had changed beyond recognition.
Chapter · 22:00-24:12
Endurance: survival, exploration, and a world at war
A review of the Endurance expedition explains how Shackleton's men returned from isolation to news of a world transformed by the First World War.