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Title: Mawson's Will: The Greatest Polar Survival Story Ever Written
ISBN: 1586420003
Author:
Lennard Bickel
Publicate Date: 2000-02-04
Publish: 2000-02-04
List Price: $15.00
Average Customer Rating: 4.5
Format: Paperback
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Amazon Lowest New Price: $6.05
Amazon Lowest Used Price: $3.35
Amazon Merchant Price: $10.20
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| Customer Review: |
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1: Machosism
I have read Endurance (about Shakelon's trip) and been to Antarctica in the last few years. The temperature, conditions, and struggle of this book didn't match what I have experienced or read by other authors. I was in Antarctica during the winter, and crossed the Antarctic Circle. The weather conditions were not anything like Mawson's description. He endured great hardships, but it was overdone. The precipitation level on Antarctica is some of the driest in the world and very similar to a desert climate with total precipitation at about 1 inch of water per year. He seemed in the story to be in constant blizzard conditions during the entire summer. Maybe it was an unusally wet year, but the others who went with him on other journeys got by much better. Not my favorite.
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2: The light in his soul
Doug Mawson just kept going through the antarctic freezing climate on foot when it would have been much easier to just go to sleep and never wake up. A brilliantly written and experienced account.
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3: Never Give Up
Lennard Bickel's "Mawson's Will" is the story of Australian geologist Douglas Mawson's 1911-1912 Expedition to Antarctica, and more particularly, his desparate struggle to return alone from a sledging expedition gone badly.
While exploring a previously untraveled portion of the Antarctic coastal plateau, Mawson loses one traveling companion, and most of his team's supplies and sled dogs, in a crevasse. His other companion dies an agonizing and lingering death of a mysterious illness. Mawson, himself suffering the same symptoms, marshals his remaining food and limited strength to walk back to the expedition's base through horrendous conditions of weather and terrain.
Bickel, working from the surviving diaries of the expedition members and interviews with family members, does a remarkable job of recreating Mawson's heroic struggle. The story is told in the third person, yet through Bickel's narrative, we are able to share in Mawson's heart-breaking daily dilemmas, as he leans out his remaining food, adapts his gear to overcome the ice and snow, and forces his rapidly deteriorating body to carry on. Mawson, possessed of a fierce will to live and a strong faith in God, was determined to fight to the last step and be open to any possibility of survival or rescue. Bickel's narrative allows us to appreciate the inner struggle of will as well as the outer one against the elements.
Mawson's expedition occured in the same timeframe as the Amundsen and Scott expeditions to the South Pole, and consequently received much less notice at the time. Bickel's narrative does an excellent job of capturing the dramatic arc of the expedition's story. This book is highly recommended to readers of polar exploration.
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4: Bickel's Gift
Rarely has fiction served the truth so well. Rarely has the truth served fiction so well.
Mawson's own account of his ordeal, in "The Home of The Blizzard", seems relatively matter of fact. We may not have marvelled at Mawson's accomplishment in surviving if we relied only on his way of telling it. Although a good writer, his specialities were geography and exploration.
Bickel's presentation here in "Mawson's Will" makes Mawson's accomplishment more touching than Mawson's own presentation. But it took an extraordinary writing accomplishment by Bickel to convey Mawson's accomplishment. Poetic license? To fail to understand how much faithful art it took to go from Mawson's diaries and book to Bickel's account would be to not appreciate how much effort and skill it took for Bickel to bring Mawson's tale so fully alive. If Bickel hadn't taken poetic license, this tale may have been of more interest to the most purist historian but it would have been of far less human interest. Sensitive to our lack of understanding of the Antartic experience, Bickel put us there in a way we never could have gotten from Mawson's own account. The last one hundred pages of "Mawson's Will" are as riveting as anything I've read in years.
Bickel's faithfulness to Mawson has made this a special work of art. Because of Bickel, we can be amazed at how Mawson survived and understand something profound about the human will.
P.S. I wake up the next day to find the story is still strong on my mind. Mawson returned to Australia to find his beloved waiting, married her, in time actually returned to the Antartic for exploration, and lived til 73. While we may never face as extreme a challenge as he did, there seems lessons here in the value of perserverence, in the benefits of careful self-management, and in the role of loved ones in making life worth living. This is an unusual book and Mawson and Bickel have made a special contribution far beyond whether land was claimed through exploration.
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5: An Unbelievable Tale of Courage and Will
I couldn't put the book down, once I started. I was awestruck by the courage and will demonstrated by Mawson. I would have given up long before. These types of men are fast-disappearing from our society--a real tragedy for us.
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