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Alone: The Classic Polar Adventure (1559634634)
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| When Admiral Richard E. Byrd set out on his second Antarctic expedition in 1934, he was already an international hero for having piloted the first flights over the North and South Poles. His plan for this latest adventure was to spend six months alone near the bottom of the world, gathering weather data and indulging his desire “to taste peace and quiet long enough to know how good they really are.” But early on things went terribly wrong. Isolated in the pervasive polar night with no hope of release until spring, Byrd began suffering inexplicable symptoms of mental and physical illness. By the time he discovered that carbon monoxide from a defective stovepipe was poisoning him, Byrd was already engaged in a monumental struggle to save his life and preserve his sanity.When Alone was first published in 1938, it became an enormous bestseller. This edition keeps alive Byrd’s unforgettable narrative for new generations of readers. Editorial Descriptions are usually submitted by the manufacturers, publishers and authors. Contact us if you are one of them, and wish to change the above description. |
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Author: Guest
What some people will do for adventure. The author describes a place no one in his right mind would want to endure. The descriptions of survival alone in the cold for many months are interesting. It was good , not great.
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Author: Guest
I learned about Alone when I read The Promise, the sequel to Chaim Potok's The Chosen. I approached Alone with that psychological twist in mind. Rather than reading it as an adventure story, I read Alone as a companion to the DSM-IV. Byrd had help making this book a good read, true; but his story is absolutely riveting. I have read the criticisms of Byrd's ineptitude, his failure of boy scout basics. I can imagine how anyone's mind would go to pieces just knowing the impossibility of rescue, the remoteness of the situation. I would not criticize this man for making the weird mistakes he made. The book is a fantastic journey not to the ends of the earth, but the depths of the human psyche.
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Author: Guest
"Cold does queer things. At 50ý below zero a flashlight dies out in your hand. At -55ý kerosene will freeze. At -60ý rubber turns brittle." These are some of Byrd's observations from his surreal solo expedition to the heart of Antarctica's night.
The expedition took place from March - August of 1934. Byrd, a former Navy officer, rugged explorer, decides to push the envelope doing something no man had ever tried before. He was to monitor the weather while living in a shack buried in snow, by himself, for the entire night-time period that covered almost 6 months.
Although the literary value regarding this book could be argued, it is nevertheless a great story based on a unique social experiment. Byrd's trail of thoughts veers from rational, to ridiculous. His mood is altered by the extreme struggles that he has to endure to serve science. However, one can pick up the vibe that he wanted to do this for himself as much as for science. He was thrilled at first, but underestimated what he was really in for.
Byrd gets crushed while he is only halfway through. The cold and physical problems put him down. He struggles between life and death for what seems to be an eternity. And it all takes place in the absolute darkness of the polar night. Byrd goes on and on about how much he learns to appreciate the simple things of modern life, while he has lost possession of them. He makes incoherent philosophical theoriest, and struggles with faith.
Finally Byrd finds the strength to go on. I wouldn't be giving up the end of the book in here by the fact that he wrote it four years after the completion of this expedition. This book would be a perfect read in the middle of the winter. The colder the better! Get a warm cup of chocolate and relive the polar experience. You will find a new appreciation for that thermostat knob while reading it.
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Author: Guest
The polar explorer Richard E. Byrd's "Alone" is an absolutely gripping narrative of his winter-over at a remote weather station in the Antarctic in 1934. Byrd, the leader of a U.S. polar expedition based at "Little America" on the Ross Ice Shelf, had intended to place a three-man station in the interior of the Antarctic to gather valuable weather data. Circumstances drove him to limit the crew to just one person, and rather than subject anyone else to the accompanying dangers, Byrd elected to man the station by himself. Byrd's account of his stay, probably written with the assistance of his good friend Charles Murphy, captures the mundane details of survival in complete darkness and staggeringly cold temperatures. It also candidly relates his struggles to survive relentless solitude and an increasingly dangerous equipment failure that came near to taking his life.
Byrd writes from another era, when mechanization was just beginning to have a major impact on exploration in extreme environments and when the interior of the Antarctic was still very much a forbidding place, nearly as remote to the world of 1934 as the surface of the Moon is now. His narrative captures the vast primitive awesomeness of the polar regions, something largely unknown to those who live outside the high latitudes. His struggle to survive is in part an effort of will to define himself against this awful grandeur; it is this element of the story that endures and fascinates today.
Kieran Mulvaney's afterword provides necessary context for Byrd's narrative and should not be overlooked, although it includes what may well be an unjustified slur on the achievements of Robert Peary. This book is highly recommended to the reader who desires to know something of a world foreign to the relatively comfortable existance most Americans experience today.
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Author: Guest
The stories of people who went through terrible situations can become hagiography. The worse torture one went through and survived, the tougher one is, right?
I expected Admiral Richard Byrd's story of his struggle with illness and the elements in a weather outpost in Antarctica, over a hundred miles from the nearest other multicellular organism, to follow this pattern. Byrd could be forgiven for slapping himself on the back for having lived through such travails, not only because it really would take a remarkable man, but also because he had to carefully tend to his reputation, which was essential to securing funding for his exploratory expeditions. But Alone, written only four years after the events described and while Byrd's future career was still an issue, is a more remarkable document than I expected.
Besides describing the remarkable routine of his outpost and how one could live there, where temperatures routinely dipped under negative forty degrees Fahrenheit, and besides describing the agony Byrd suffered from an insidious carbon monoxide leak in the very stove that he depended on to stay warm enough to survive, Byrd also writes what puts his reputation at risk. He describes with a surprising lack of defensiveness his mental breakdown. Over sixty awful days, Byrd changed from the intrepid explorer who wanted to spend nine months alone in the Antarctic winter just for the experience to an emaciated, pain-wracked man who could not bear to stick to his original resolution to forbid a dangerous rescue attempt.
Like I said, merely telling how he endured pain could only make Byrd look more manly. Tough guys endure pain. But by telling the extent to which the pain unmanned him (in his own turn-of-the-century Virginian mind), Byrd gives a memoir that is as remarkable for its honesty as it is for the fascinating environment in which his adventure takes place. Letting this book be published during his lifetime is perhaps as great an act of courage as that which he showed during the events of this extraordinary and fascinating book.
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