Endurance: Shackleton's Incredible Voyage
By: Alfred Lansing / Narrated By: Simon Prebble
Length: 10 hrs and 20 mins
Storytelling at its very, very best
Seriously. We all KNOW what’s going to happen; we all KNOW how it winds up in the end, but really? Uhm, no! You’ve not had a rollicking good time, an edge-of-your-seat experience until you’ve listened to Alfred Lansing’s Endurance!
At the very beginning, oh way back when, during my first listen of the audiobook, I wasn’t sure I was going to even like it. It’s a bit heavy on the boring everyday moments of planning such an expedition, of building support, of bringing in enough money, blah blah blah, that I thought: Ho hum.
But almost from the get go, after that (which is, admittedly, not that long, so I shoulda just stopped my whining and whinging!), it’s a total blast off! Things just go from bad to worse, to even worse, to absolutely IMPOSSIBLE. Really! You’re just held captive by Lansing’s stellar storytelling. (Full disclosure? For days after listening to it, I went through my days periodically shouting, “SHACKLETON!” …drove my husband nuts…)
There was a series on PBS about some modern day adventurers who decided to walk in Shackleton’s shoes and recreated his voyage, and it damned near disgusted me to death. Because they couldn’t even BEGIN to imagine what he and his men went through. The adventurers didn’t have ragged, torn, threadbare clothing. They didn’t sleep on skins that went all slimy through decay. They didn’t have to spend HOURS moving rocks back and forth as ballast. And they most certainly did NOT have his knack for keeping spirits up, faith and hope alive. Those modern dudes were at each other’s throats as soon as the going got rough. In Endurance, we get to see how shrewd Shackleton was in how he grouped certain people together, and how he personally took on the spoilsports and rabble-rousers to keep them in line, to keep them from poisoning the thoughts of all the other men. Shrewd and skilled.
And the narration here! Simon Prebble became one of my favorite narrators with his work right here. I mean, so MUCH goes so VERY wrong, it’s uphill all the way. How on earth does ANY narrator manage to read it all, cranking up the tension notch by tiny notch, throughout the entire audiobook?!? Simon Prebble does. Plus, he manages an entire ship’s crew, captures their personalities through their diary entries, their interviews.
What I really, really love about Endurance is that every time I listen to it, ‘twould appear that the weather outside is hot and balmy. But walking through the neighborhood, earbuds in my ears, and listening to Simon Prebble tell me this story?
I get chills! No matter how hot it is, I shiver and quake with the cold of all of Ernest Shackleton’s ice and glaciers. What a freakin’ treat!!!
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