Bøger af Caroline Alexander

"In April 1942, the Imperial Japanese Army steamrolled through Burma, capturing the only ground route from India to China. Supplies to this critical zone would now have to come from India by air--meaning across the Himalayas, on the most hazardous air route in the world. Skies of Thunder is a story of an epic human endeavor, in which Allied troops faced the monumental challenge of operating from airfields hacked from the jungle, and took on 'the Hump, ' the fearsome mountain barrier that defined the air route. They flew fickle, untested aircraft through monsoons and enemy fire, at brain-melting altitudes with inaccurate maps and only primitive navigation technology. The result was a litany of both deadly crashes and astonishing feats of survival. The most chaotic of all the war's arenas, the China-Burma-India theater was further confused by the conflicting political interests of Roosevelt, Churchill, and their demanding nominal ally, Chiang Kai-shek"--

"Spectacular and constantly surprising." -Ken Burns Written with the authority of a scholar and the vigor of a bestselling narrative historian, The War That Killed Achilles is a superb and utterly timely presentation of one of the timeless stories of Western civilization. As she did in The Endurance and The Bounty, New York Times bestselling author Caroline Alexander has taken apart a narrative we think we know and put it back together in a way that lets us see its true power. In the process, she reveals the intended theme of Homer's masterwork-the tragic lessons of war and its enduring devastation.

In August 1914, days before the outbreak of the First World War, the renowned explorer Ernest Shackleton and a crew of twenty-seven set sail for the South Atlantic in pursuit of the last unclaimed prize in the history of exploration: the first crossing on foot of the Antarctic continent. Weaving a treacherous path through the freezing Weddell Sea, they had come within eighty-five miles of their destination when their ship, Endurance, was trapped fast in the ice pack. Soon the ship was crushed like matchwood, leaving the crew stranded on the floes. Their ordeal would last for twenty months, and they would make two near-fatal attempts to escape by open boat before their final rescue.Drawing upon previously unavailable sources, Caroline Alexander gives us a riveting account of Shackleton's expedition--one of history's greatest epics of survival. And she presents the astonishing work of Frank Hurley, the Australian photographer whose visual record of the adventure has never before been published comprehensively. Together, text and image re-create the terrible beauty of Antarctica, the awful destruction of the ship, and the crew's heroic daily struggle to stay alive, a miracle achieved largely through Shackleton's inspiring leadership. The survival of Hurley's remarkable images is scarcely less miraculous: The original glass plate negatives, from which most of the book's illustrations are superbly reproduced, were stored in hermetically sealed cannisters that survived months on the ice floes, a week in an open boat on the polar seas, and several more months buried in the snows of a rocky outcrop called Elephant Island. Finally Hurley was forced to abandon his professional equipment; he captured some of the most unforgettable images of the struggle with a pocket camera and three rolls of Kodak film.Published in conjunction with the American Museum of Natural History's landmark exhibition on Shackleton's journey, The Endurance thrillingly recounts one of the last great adventures in the Heroic Age of exploration--perhaps the greatest of them all.

The bestselling author of The Endurance reveals the startling truth behind the legend of the Mutiny on the Bounty - the most famous sea story of all time.More than two centuries have passed since Fletcher Christian mutinied against Lt. Bligh on a small armed transport vessel called Bounty. Why the details of this obscure adventure at the end of the world remain vivid and enthralling is as intriguing as the truth behind the legend. Caroline Alexander focusses on the court martial of the ten mutineers captured in Tahiti and brought to justice in Portsmouth. Each figure emerges as a richly drawn character caught up in a drama that may well end on the gallows. With enormous scholarship and exquisitely drawn characters, The Bounty is a tour de force.Note that it has not been possible to include the same picture content that appeared in the original print version.

The Iliad is still the greatest poem about war that our culture has ever produced. For a hundred generations, poets and thinkers in the West have pored over, retold and argued about the events described in this martial epic, even when direct knowledge of it was lost. Various empires have admired it as a book that in telling the story of the siege of Troy also extols the warrior ethic, and teaches the young how to die well.Yet the figure at the heart of the epic, the consummate warrior Achilles, is a brooding, controversial hero. He is a fierce critic of those who have started this war and allowed it to drag on, consuming soldiers and civilians alike. Disconcertingly, The Iliad portrays war as a catastrophe that destroys cities, orphans children and wrecks whole societies.Caroline Alexander's extraordinary book is not about any of the traditional concerns that have occupied classicists for centuries. It is simpler and more radical than that. In her words, 'This book is about what the Iliad is about; this book is about what the Iliad says of war.'

The carpenter has a very fine cat who is known as "Mrs. Chippie"... -- from the diary of Commander F. A. Worsley, captain of Shackleton's Endurance When Sir Ernest Shackleton's ship Endurance became trapped in the Antarctic ice, all twenty-nine members of the crew were pushed to their limits of survival, including Mrs. Chippy, the ship's estimable cat. Fortunately for posterity, Mrs. Chippy left a diary of the ordeal. Closely based on the true events of Shackleton's heroic journey, and illustrated with authentic photographs taken by Frank Hurley, expedition photographer, Mrs. Chippy's Last Expedition is a firsthand account of one of the greatest adventures in history--from a unique point of view.