So, I thought Story of America was pretty good and I learned a lot of interesting things. It definitely just felt like reading a bunch of New Yorker articles but that's exactly what it is.
ANYWAY
Goodbye Jill Lepore, hello Roland Huntford. This time we are visiting my all-time favorite genre which is "Heroic Accounts of South Pole Exploration." If you're going to know one author in the "Heroic Accounts of South Pole Exploration" genre it should probably be Roland Huntford. The man has written the standard biographies of all the great polar explorers from the early 1900s: Shackleton, Scott, Amundsen, and Nansen. He is the authority. And he looks so nice:
I've read a bunch of these polar explorer books -- See list here -- but I haven't read this one yet. It's called "Race for the South Pole: The Expedition Diaries of Scott and Amundsen." It is the epic story of 2 men who raced to be the first to stand at the south pole. Both made it out, but one didn't make it back. The book puts their diaries side by side.
Get stoked, y'all