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According to Apsley Cherry-Garrard, one of the men who went to Antarctica with Captain Scott, "Polar exploration is at once the cleanest and most isolated way of having a bad time that has ever been devised." Despite this there has never been a shortage of volunteers willing to endure the bad times in pursuit of the glory that polar exploration sometimes brings.
Nick Rennison's compelling book tells the memorable stories of people who have risked their lives by entering the white wastelands of the Arctic and the Antarctic, from the compelling tales of Scott, Shackleton and Amundsen, to those of lesser known explorers such as Elisha Kent Kane and Douglas Mawson. A Short History of Polar Exploration also looks briefly at the hold that the polar regions have often had on the imaginations of artists and writers in the last two hundred years examining the paintings, films and literature that they have inspired
Nick Rennison is a writer, editor and was a bookseller at Waterstones where he edited their quarterly magazine. He has published books on a wide variety of subjects from Sherlock Holmes to London's blue plaques. He is a regular reviewer for the Sunday Times and for BBC History magazine. His titles for Pocket Essentials include Roget: The Man Who Became a Book and Robin Hood: Myth, History and Culture. He lives near Manchester.
