Brendan’s Alternate Tagline for The Ship Beneath the Ice:
Ok, I’d get on a boat for something like this.
Quick synopsis:
The story of finding Shackleton’s ship, Endurance.
Fact for Non-History People:
In the last 35 years, the Adelie penguin population has decreased 80%. SAVE THE PENGUINS!!
Fact for History Nerds:
Due to salinity, seawater doesn’t begin freezing until below -1.8 degrees Celsius.
My Take on The Ship Beneath the Ice:
Would you like to read someone’s diary? Ok, but what if that diary is about finding a sunken ship under the ice of Antarctica? Now I have your attention, don’t I?
Mensun Bound’s The Ship Beneath the Ice follows two attempts by Bound to locate Endurance. Ernest Shackleton’s ill-fated ship sank over 100 years ago and there are some pretty good leads about where it is exactly. Unfortunately, it is in the most inhospitable place on Earth.
Bound writes a day-by-day diary of his two missions to locate Endurance. You would have to ignore a lot of news to not know how the second mission finally turned out. Bound also intersperses insight from Shackleton’s famous trip into his own experiences. This method of telling a story is very effective at first. Bound is open about his own self-doubt, his challenges, and what Endurance means to him. I enjoyed having a narrator who is so candid about his feelings and fears.
Unfortunately, it starts to slow the narrative down by the end of the book. Bound is still talking about the original Endurance mission in the final chapters and it gets distracting rather than enlightening. By that point, you just want to hear about the outcome of the mission and what it means. It doesn’t ruin the book by any means, but it takes a little shine off the apple.
(This book was provided to me as an advance copy by Netgalley and Mariner Books.)
Verdict:
A super cool read. Buy it here!
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