Alone on the Ice
The Greatest Survival Story in the History of Exploration
W.W. Norton & Co., March 2013
Scott, Shackleton, Amundsen…. and Douglas Mawson, the greatest Antarctic explorer you’ve never heard of, was their contemporary (he was part of the second Shackleton expedition) and every bit their equal. Yet he is largely unknown in the U.S., for several reasons: Mawson was interested in science, not the glory of the race for the pole; because he was Australian; and perhaps most of all, because his great Antarctic expedition took place in the others’ shadow. Mawson was in the field at the moment Amundsen made headlines by beating Scott to the pole. Yet as a feat of survival in the Polar Regions, it exceeds them all
Roberts…does an excellent job of placing the reader inside the head of the men and showing what towering resolve it must have taken to push onward, especially during the incredible climax: Mawson, his friends dead and his body on the brink of defeat, dangles on his harness line in the air of a yawning crevasse, 14 feet below the surface. Here, twisting on the line, he is brought to the absolute brink of his own mortality. With this riveting account, Roberts has done a service to the histories of exploration and human resilience.
—The Daily Beast
The book is impressively seamless and straightforward. A tale of action, it proceeds from event to event, periodically shifting settings in an almost unremarkable way. Were it not for the author’s moment of self-consciousness, I might have missed the sleight of hand that is required to transform a messy, overlapping history into a smooth and readable book
—The Boston Globe