Riffenburgh, Beau. Shackleton's Forgotten Expedition: The Voyage of the Nimrod.

RIFFENBURGH, Beau. Shackleton's forgotten expedition; the voyage of the Nimrod. Bloomsbury. 358p. illus, notes, bibliog, index. c2005.1-58234-611-9. $15.95. SA

Shackleton was a genuinely larger-than-life figure who fully deserves to be ranked as one of the 19th century's greatest explorers. In an age filled with doughty explorers like Byrd, Peary, and Amundson, all of whom made the fictional Indiana Jones seem effete, Shackleton wins the prize for leadership and courage, hands down. Nearly all of Shackleton's present fame rests on his great adventure when he rescued his entire crew after his ship, the Endurance, was crushed in the Weddell Sea icepack during his 1915 Antarctic expedition. A long journey on foot along the bitter coast to the open sea, a perilous trip in a makeshift open boat, and the crossing of a mountain range led to immense public acclaim. Unfortunately, this real-life drama overshadowed the man's first polar venture, the grandly named British Antarctic Expedition of 1907-1909. This is a pity, because during this earlier trek Shackleton discovered the route to Antarctica's great inland plateau and marked the trail taken by Robert Scott, Roald Amundson, and nearly everyone else since. He may have failed to reach the South Pole that time, but his party was the first to arrive at the South Magnetic Pole, and the first to climb Mount Erebus.

Shackleton was a fascinating personality in his own right, a genuine leader who always knew how to get what he wanted from his highly stratified British society. Determination, duplicity, great curiosity, and smug Edwardian superiority battled for equal parts of his soul. Riffenburgh writes about the man and the Southern Continent with a self-assured familiarity that, in his own case, is especially well founded. The author took his doctorate in history at the Scott Polar Research Institute at Cambridge and has since written authoritatively about the Antarctic. If his narrative sometimes edges toward the overdramatic, at least it is in keeping with Shackleton's own times; all the people in this book would have understood him perfectly. Recommended to all biographical collections. Raymond Puffer, Ph.D., Historian, Edwards AFB, Lancaster, CA