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Gail Pool

TraveLit--A blog about travel literature. 

     Even with the best of maps and instruments, we can never fully chart our journeys.

Book Review

September 22, 2013

"To travel. An intransitive verb. A state of being, not a journey to a destination."
―Jonathan Raban, Coasting

Three in Norway by Two of Them
By J. A. Lees and W. J. Clutterbuck. Aschehoug, 1995 (1968 edition), 205 pp.

When my husband picked up Three in Norway by Two of Them at a library sale, drawn to the subject of Norway where he had lived as a child, we knew nothing about the book. Mainly we were surprised at the curious edition, which failed to identify the authors on the cover or even on the title page.

But it turns out the book is a classic.  Read More 

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Book Review

September 18, 2013

“Polar exploration is at once the cleanest and most isolated way of having a bad time which has been devised.”
― Apsley Cherry-Garrard, The Worst Journey in the World

Alone on the Ice: The Greatest Survival Story in the History of Exploration
By David Roberts. W.W. Norton, 2013, 368 pp.

Ever since I first read about Douglas Mawson in Lennard Bickel’s Mawson’s Will, I’ve wondered why this great Australian Antarctic explorer is so little known in this country, even by polar exploration fans. While Amundsen, Scott, and Shackleton have had fame and cultish followings, Mawson’s name, I find, tends to draw a blank. And yet his solitary trek in Antarctica was extraordinary—indeed, Sir Edmund Hillary called it “the greatest survival story in the history of exploration.”  Read More 

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