Saturday Samplers Book Group to Discuss "Endurance"

Bernardsville Library’s book discussion group, Saturday Samplers, will meet on Saturday, September 9 at 11:00 am to discuss "Endurance: Shackleton's Incredible Voyage " (1959) by Alfred Lansing.

The book is a riveting account of polar explorer Ernest Shackleton's survival for over a year on the ice-bound Antarctic seas in 1914-1915. As Time magazine put it, Shackleton "defined heroism" during this journey. Alfred Lansing's scrupulously researched and brilliantly narrated book -- with over 200,000 copies sold -- has long been acknowledged as the definitive account of the boat 'Endurance' and the fateful trip. To write their authoritative story, more than forty years later, Lansing consulted with ten of the surviving members (there were 28 on the journey) and gained access to diaries and personal accounts by eight others. The resulting book has all the immediacy of a first-hand account.

In August 1914, Shackleton boarded the Endurance and set sail for Antarctica, where he planned to cross the last uncharted continent on foot. In January 1915, after battling its way through a thousand miles of pack ice and only a day's sail short of its destination, the Endurance became locked in an island of ice. Thus began the legendary ordeal of Shackleton and his crew of twenty-seven men.

For ten months the ice-moored Endurance drifted northwest before it was finally crushed between two ice floes. With no options left, Shackleton and a skeleton crew attempted a near-impossible journey over 850 miles of the South Atlantic's heaviest seas to the closest outpost of civilization. Their survival, and the survival of the men they left behind, depended on their small lifeboat successfully finding the island of South Georgia—a tiny dot of land in a vast and hostile ocean.

Saturday Samplers is a book discussion group dedicated to sampling various kinds of literature, including short stories, nonfiction, new and old novels, and teen fiction. Its goal is to search out interesting, noteworthy, and sometimes overlooked literary and narrative works. No sign-up is needed to join the discussion. Call the library at 766-0118 for more information.