Few people put Antarctica on their bucket lists. There are no beaches, no museums, no cities or permanent residents--just five million square miles of land, 98% of which is covered with ice (the remainder is bare rock). Still, a transcontinental trip across Antarctica has entranced the modern world's great explorers since Ernest Shackleton's tragic Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition in the early 1900s. It wasn't until the 1955-1958 Commonwealth Trans-Antarctic Expedition that other explorers accomplished Shackleton's dream of an edge-to-edge land crossing of the continent.
Vivian Fuchs's successful expedition included George Lowe, the mountaineer photographer and filmmaker who had recorded Sir Edmund Hillary's 1953 conquest of Everest. The Crossing of Antarctica: Original Photographs from the Pioneering Expedition celebrates the centennial of Shackleton's failed crossing with the first collection of Lowe's original expedition photographs, a historical narrative by University of Cambridge Professor Huw Lewis-Jones, and selected reflections by renowned world explorers. Its 200 images show all the ice, snow, wind, frozen whiskers, Sno-Cats and sled dogs needed to illustrate the magnitude of the team's accomplishment. --Bruce Jacobs, founding partner Watermark Books & Cafe, Wichita, Kan.