Bound for Antarctica, where polar explorer Ernest Shackleton planned to cross on foot the last uncharted continent, theEnduranceset sail from England in August 1914. In January 1915, after battling its way for six weeks through a thousand miles of pack ice and now only a day's sail short of its destination, theEndurancebecame locked in an island of ice.

For ten months the ice-mooredEndurancedrifted northwest before it was finally crushed. But for Shackleton and his crew of twenty-seven men the ordeal had barely begun. It would end only after a near-miraculous journey by Shackleton and a skeleton crew through over 850 miles of the South Atlantic's heaviest seas to the closest outpost of civilization.

This astonishing tale of survival by Shackleton and all twenty-seven of his men for over a year on the ice-bound Antarctic seas, asTimemagazine put it, "defined heroism." Alfred Lansing's brilliantly narrated book has long been acknowledged as the definitive account of theEndurance's fateful trip.