Summer may be winding down, but that doesn’t mean that the adventures must stop. Below is a selection of fantastic history reads that will take you from the dangerous terrain of Mt. Everest to the freezing Polar North to the wild American frontier. What adventure will you be joining from the safety and comfort of your home?
New this month, the unsolved mysteries of George Mallory, Sandy Irvine, and their legendary 1924 Everest expedition.
There is no mystery more compelling in the history of mountaineering than the disappearance of George Mallory and Sandy Irvine close to the summit of Mount Everest on June 8, 1924. Over 100 years after they were last seen ‘going strong for the top,’ the question of exactly what happened to them on that fateful day has not been answered.
Written by Julie Summers, Sandy Irvine’s great-niece, and Jochen Hemmleb, the world’s leading authority on the Mallory and Irvine Everest expedition, The Everest Mystery explores the life of Sandy Irvine, his relationship with George Mallory, and the many theories about what happened to them so close to the summit of Mount Everest. Above all, it restores Sandy Irvine to his rightful place in the great mystery of Everest 1924.
The true, harrowing story of the ill-fated 1913 Canadian Arctic Expedition and the two men who came to define it.
In the summer of 1913, the wooden-hulled brigantine Karluk departed Canada for the Arctic Ocean with Captain Bob Bartlett at the helm and Vilhjalmur Stefansson as the expedition’s leader. Just six weeks after the Karluk departed, the ship became icebound. Stefansson disembarked with five companions and struck out on what he claimed was a 10-day caribou hunting trip. Most on board would never see him again. Under Bartlett’s leadership the crew built make-shift shelters, surviving the freezing darkness of Polar night. Captain Bartlett now made a difficult and courageous decision. He would attempt a 1000-mile journey to save the shipwrecked survivors. It was their only hope.
Filled with heroism, tragedy, and scientific discovery, Buddy Levy’s Empire of Ice and Stone tells the story of two men and two distinctively different brands of leadership and how they would forever be bound by one of the most audacious and disastrous expeditions in polar history.
The explosive true saga of the legendary figure Daniel Boone and the bloody struggle for America’s frontier by bestselling authors Bob Drury and Tom Clavin.
It is the mid-eighteenth century, and in the thirteen colonies founded by Great Britain, anxious colonists desperate to conquer and settle North America’s “First Frontier” beyond the Appalachian Mountains commence a series of bloody battles. These violent conflicts are waged against the Native American tribes whose lands they covet, the French, and the mother country itself in an American Revolution destined to reverberate around the world.
This is the setting of Blood and Treasure, and the guide to this epic narrative is America’s first and arguably greatest pathfinder, Daniel Boone—not the coonskin cap-wearing caricature of popular culture but the flesh-and-blood frontiersman and Revolutionary War hero whose explorations into the forested frontier beyond the great mountains would become the stuff of legend. Now, thanks to painstaking research by two award-winning authors, the story of the brutal birth of the United States is told through the eyes of both the ordinary and larger-than-life men and women who witnessed it.
The adventurous, true tale of the first female captain of a merchant ship and her treacherous navigation of Antarctica’s deadly waters.
Summer, 1856
Nineteen-year-old Mary Ann Patten and her husband, Joshua, were young and ambitious. Both from New England seafaring families, they had already completed their first clipper-ship voyage around the world with Joshua as captain. If they could win the race to San Francisco that year, their dream of building a farm and a family might be within reach. It would mean freedom. And the price of that freedom was one last dangerous transit—into the most treacherous waters in the world.
As their ship sailed down the jagged coast of South America, Joshua fell deathly ill, so Mary Ann stepped into the role of captain just as the ship slammed into a gale that would last 18 days. Determined to save the ship, the crew, and their future, she faces down the deadly waters of Drake’s Passage.
Set against the backdrop of the California Gold Rush and taking us to the brink of Antarctica, The Sea Captain’s Wife finally gives Mary Ann Patten—the first woman to command a merchant vessel as captain — her due.
The never-before-told story of the women Egyptologists who paved the way who paved the way for exploration in Egypt and laid the groundwork for Egyptology.
The history of Egyptology is often told as yet one more grand narrative of powerful men striving to seize the day and the precious artifacts for their competing homelands. But that is only half of the story. During the so-called Golden Age of Exploration, there were women working and exploring before Howard Carter discovered the tomb of King Tut. Before men even conceived of claiming the story for themselves, women were working in Egypt to lay the groundwork for all future exploration.
In Women in the Valley of the Kings: The Untold Story of Women Egyptologists in the Gilded Age, Kathleen Sheppard brings the untold stories of these women back into this narrative, and through extensive research, she shows how a group of courageous women charted unknown territory and changed the field of Egyptology forever.
From renowned underwater archaeologist David Gibbins comes an exciting and rich narrative of human history told through the archaeological discoveries of twelve shipwrecks across time.
Since we first set sail on the open sea, ships and their wrecks have been an inevitable part of human history. Archaeologists have made spectacular discoveries excavating these sunken ships, their protective underwater cocoon keeping evidence of past civilizations preserved.
A History of the World in 12 Shipwrecks is not just the story of those ships, the people who sailed on them, and the cargo and treasure they carried, but also the story of the spread of people, religion, and ideas around the world; it is a story of colonialism, migration, and the indominable human spirit that continues today. From the glittering Bronze Age, to the world of Caesar’s Rome, through the era of the Vikings, to the exploration of the Arctic, Gibbins uses shipwrecks to tell all.
Drawing on decades of experience excavating shipwrecks around the world, Gibbins reveals the riches beneath the waves and shows us how the treasures found there can be a porthole to the past that tell a new story about the world and its underwater secrets.
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