BIOGRAPHY
Explorers & Adventurers
14 books
The people who went where the map ran out, and the writers good enough to bring the terror back intact. Ambrose and Bergreen handle Lewis and Clark and Magellan; Huntford's Shackleton and Scott-and-Amundsen are the definitive accounts of ice and ambition; Collins writes going to the moon from the one man who stayed in orbit. Thesiger and Ibn Battuta cross deserts centuries apart, and Fiennes proves the type is still alive. Every one of these is a story of appetite outrunning sense, and every one is a great read. Start with Endurance-era Shackleton, or Undaunted Courage for the American version.
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Over the Edge of the World: Magellan's Terrifying Circumnavigation of the Globe
Laurence Bergreen
In 1519 Ferdinand Magellan left Spain with five ships and 270 men to circumnavigate the globe. Three years later one ship and 18 men returned. Magellan himself was killed in the Philippines — stabbed on a beach in a skirmish he had no business fighting, having already achieved the navigational feat that secured his legacy. Bergreen follows the expedition from its chaotic departure through the Pacific crossing — weeks without wind, men dying of scurvy, a mutiny suppressed at sword-point — to the skeleton fleet that finally limped home to Spain. The first circumnavigation of the earth told as the survival story it actually was, without the triumphalism that usually attaches to tales of exploration. One of the least-known stories on this list and one of the most gripping.
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Undaunted Courage
Stephen Ambrose
Stephen Ambrose, better known as author of the bestseller turned miniseries Band of Brothers, offers an insightful look into the life and adventures of Meriwether Lewis, co-leader of the Corps of Discovery, also known as the Lewis and Clark Expedition.
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Carrying the Fire
Michael Collins
Collins was the Apollo 11 astronaut who stayed in the command module while Armstrong and Aldrin walked on the Moon — orbiting the far side of the Moon alone for hours without radio contact, arguably the loneliest human being in history. His memoir is the best account of the space program available: technically precise, unexpectedly funny, and written with the specific dry intelligence of a man who watched the greatest achievement in human history from the best possible vantage point and understood exactly what he was seeing. Around 450 pages and the deepest cut on modern exploration. James Hansen's First Man is the full authorized Armstrong biography for the reader who wants the dedicated account of the man who actually stepped out.
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Fate Is the Hunter
Ernest K. Gann
Gann flew commercial and military aircraft in the 1930s and 40s when aviation was genuinely exploratory — routes across oceans and continents that had never been flown, instruments that sometimes lied, weather that killed without warning, and the specific culture of early aviators who understood their profession as a negotiation with death conducted daily. The memoir covers his career with the honesty of a man who watched colleagues die in ways that were partly mechanical failure, partly bad luck, and partly the specific fatalism that the job produced. Around 350 pages and the best aviation memoir ever written. Cross-seeds with the Craft, Skill and Mastery list. Beryl Markham's West with the Night — the most beautiful piece of aviation prose available, written by the first person to fly solo east to west across the North Atlantic — belongs in your queue immediately after.
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Sir Francis Drake
John Sugden
Drake was simultaneously the greatest English navigator of the sixteenth century and the most successful pirate in history — in Elizabethan England the two roles were indistinguishable. Sugden covers the full life: the slave-trading origins that he spent the rest of his career atoning for, the circumnavigation of 1577-1580 that made him the second man to sail around the world and the first to survive it, the raid on Cadiz that burned the Spanish fleet in harbor, and the Armada campaign. The specific combination of navigation genius, tactical audacity, and personal ruthlessness that made Drake the man Philip II of Spain put a price on is covered without sanitizing. Around 400 pages and the most complete Drake biography available. Fawn Brodie's The Devil Drives covers the psychological interior of the Victorian explorer Richard Burton with the same literary quality for the reader who wants the parallel life.
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The Life of My Choice
Wilfred Thesiger
Thesiger crossed the Empty Quarter twice, traveled through the Kurdish mountains, lived with the Marsh Arabs of Iraq, and spent decades exploring East Africa — always with local companions, always refusing the modern world's shortcuts, always on foot or camel because vehicles were a concession to weakness he wasn't willing to make. The autobiography covers the full extraordinary life: the Ethiopian childhood watching Haile Selassie's coronation, the Oxford boxing blue, the SAS service in WWII, and the decades of travel that made him the last of the Victorian explorers born sixty years too late. Around 450 pages. Arabian Sands — his account of the Empty Quarter crossings — is already on the Middle Eastern History list and belongs in the reader's queue immediately after this one.
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Mad, Bad and Dangerous to Know
Ranulph Fiennes
Fiennes has climbed Everest in his seventies, run seven marathons on seven continents in seven days a week after a heart attack, lost the tips of his fingers to frostbite on a solo Arctic crossing and removed them himself with a saw in his garden shed, and was described by the Guinness Book of Records as the world's greatest living explorer. His autobiography covers all of it with the specific British understatement of a man who finds excessive drama undignified. Around 450 pages and the humor entry this list needs — not written as comedy but impossible to read without incredulous laughter at what one human being has voluntarily subjected himself to. The AoM reader who finishes this book and does not immediately want to do something difficult has missed the point.
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Explorers of the Nile
Tim Jeal
The Victorian obsession with finding the source of the Nile produced the most dramatic and competitive exploration theater in history — Burton and Speke nearly killing each other over the question, Grant and Baker pushing further south, Livingstone disappearing for years at a time, and Stanley finally finding Livingstone and then completing the mapping himself. Jeal covers all of them as a collective biography of an era in which geography was still the last frontier and personal rivalries between explorers shaped the maps of continents. Around 500 pages and the most dramatically satisfying overview on this list — the competition between the men is as interesting as the territory they were racing to name. The natural entry point before the dedicated biographies that follow.
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Livingstone
Tim Jeal
The Scottish missionary who mapped the African interior, discovered Victoria Falls, denounced the Arab slave trade, and disappeared into Central Africa for six years before Stanley found him on the shores of Lake Tanganyika. Jeal's biography is the definitive account — honest about Livingstone's catastrophic failures as a husband and father, honest about the missionary enterprise and what it opened Africa to, and completely honest about the gap between the public hero and the difficult, driven man behind it. Around 500 pages and the most morally complex entry on this list. The AoM reader who wants pure admiration will not find it here — Jeal gives him something more useful, which is the full truth about what it costs to be genuinely extraordinary and what it costs the people around you.
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Shackleton
Roland Huntford
Endurance is already on the Man vs. Nature list — this is the full biographical treatment of the man behind it. Huntford covers the full life: the early Antarctic expeditions, the specifically Irish charm that made men follow Shackleton into situations they knew were dangerous, the Endurance disaster and the extraordinary open-boat rescue, and the restless postwar years of a man who was only fully himself in extremis. Huntford is harder on Shackleton than most biographers — he documents the financial chaos, the failed marriages, and the expeditions that served Shackleton's ego alongside science — and the resulting portrait is more interesting than the hagiography. Around 450 pages. The reader who wants Shackleton's own account should go to South immediately after.
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The Travels of Ibn Battuta
Ibn Battuta, abridged by Tim Mackintosh-Smith
Ibn Battuta left Morocco in 1325 and spent 29 years traveling 75,000 miles across the Islamic world, sub-Saharan Africa, India, China, and Southeast Asia — further than any traveler before the age of steam, and he wrote it all down. The Mackintosh-Smith abridgment makes the primary source accessible without losing the voice: a man who accepted hospitality from sultans, was enslaved by pirates, survived shipwrecks and court intrigues across a dozen civilizations, and delivered observations on all of it with the calm interest of someone who found everything worth recording. The deepest cut on this list and the most purely enjoyable primary source on this entire project. Tim Mackintosh-Smith's Travels with a Tangerine retraces the routes in the 1990s with dry British wit for the reader who wants the modern companion.
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Scott and Amundsen
Roland Huntford
The race to the South Pole in 1911-1912 — the Norwegian Amundsen arriving first, Scott arriving five weeks later to find Amundsen's tent and flag, then dying on the return journey 11 miles from his supply depot. Huntford's dual biography covers both men at full biographical length: Amundsen's professional preparation and specific Norwegian relationship with cold-weather travel, and Scott's Royal Navy formation that produced the specific institutional habits that killed him. The book is controversial in Britain because it refuses to let Scott die a hero when the evidence shows him dying from avoidable decisions. Around 600 pages and the most rigorous polar biography available. Huntford also wrote the definitive Shackleton biography elsewhere on this list — two entries by one author justified by two genuinely different subjects.
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Passionate Nomad
Jane Fletcher Geniesse
Freya Stark traveled alone through the most remote parts of Persia, Arabia, and Afghanistan in the 1920s and 30s — learning the languages, making the maps, and writing about it with a literary precision that made her the most celebrated travel writer of her generation. Geniesse's biography covers the full extraordinary life: the difficult bohemian childhood in Europe, the journeys into territories where no Western woman had traveled, the wartime work for British intelligence across the Middle East, and the travels that continued into her nineties. Around 380 pages. Stark's own Valley of the Assassins — her account of traveling alone into the Elburz mountains of Persia in 1930 — is the essential primary source companion and the most beautiful travel writing on this entire project.
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Captain Sir Richard Francis Burton
Edward Rice
Burton spoke 29 languages, disguised himself as a Muslim pilgrim to enter Mecca — death if discovered — explored the African lakes with Speke, translated the Kama Sutra and the Arabian Nights into English, served as a consul in West Africa and Brazil and Damascus, and wrote 43 books. He is the most extraordinary Englishman of the Victorian era and the most improbably excessive life on this list — the AoM reader who finishes this biography will find it difficult to explain to anyone who hasn't read it. Rice covers the full arc without flinching from Burton's failures and obsessions. Around 500 pages. Fawn Brodie's The Devil Drives covers the same life with more psychological depth for the reader who wants the interior portrait alongside the exterior adventure.