Here are 100 books that First Man fans have personally recommended if you like
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I’ve spent 20 years researching Antarctica and polar history to learn about my father’s experiences on Admiral Richard E. Byrd’s III expedition or the USASE in 1939-41. I’ve been passionate about art, travel, and learning about other cultures for most of my life. I’m excited to say, I’ve worked on all the continents! My interests led me to a career as a leadership consultant, executive coach and team facilitator. Since 2020, I have had a dream job working with Antarctic scientists and teams, assisting them to manage stress and conflict in the field. With a lifetime of experience in the performing arts, my work inspires leaders to unlock their full potential and drive meaningful change.
I am excited by the actual diary entries and art work from a wide range of essential expeditions. This gorgeous tabletop book reinforced my desire to travel the world. The famous explorers, many of them unknown to me, captured the breadth and depth of distance places.
I feel a kinship with the documentation of bravery and experiences from around the world.
The sketchbook has been the one constant in explorers' kits for centuries of adventure. Often private, they are records of immediate experiences and discoveries, and in their pages we can see what the explorers themselves encountered. This remarkable book showcases 70 such sketchbooks, kept by intrepid men and women as they journeyed perilous and unknown environments—frozen wastelands, high mountains, barren deserts, and dense rainforests—with their senses wide open. Figures such as Charles Darwin and Sir Edmund Hillary are joined here by lesser-known explorers such as Adela Breton, who braved the jungles of Mexico to make a record of Mayan monuments.…
A moving story of love, betrayal, and the enduring power of hope in the face of darkness.
German pianist Hedda Schlagel's world collapsed when her fiancé, Fritz, vanished after being sent to an enemy alien camp in the United States during the Great War. Fifteen years later, in 1932, Hedda…
I’ve spent 20 years researching Antarctica and polar history to learn about my father’s experiences on Admiral Richard E. Byrd’s III expedition or the USASE in 1939-41. I’ve been passionate about art, travel, and learning about other cultures for most of my life. I’m excited to say, I’ve worked on all the continents! My interests led me to a career as a leadership consultant, executive coach and team facilitator. Since 2020, I have had a dream job working with Antarctic scientists and teams, assisting them to manage stress and conflict in the field. With a lifetime of experience in the performing arts, my work inspires leaders to unlock their full potential and drive meaningful change.
I’ve never seen anything like this body of work—it’s mesmerizing to see Brian Jarvi’s paintings and thought process behind his 17-year creation. It makes me celebrate Nature as he intended and I feel awe for the realism he depicts.
As I read, I witness the conversation that must be taking place between animals and humanity to shape the future on our planet.
Depicting more than 220 African species, the stunning large-scale mural African Menagerie is artist Brian Jarvi s masterwork. Lavishly reproduced in an oversize format with a gatefold, this book brings this landscape masterpiece to the conservationist, lover of Africa, and fan of wildlife art. In oversized colour reproductions, the book African Menagerie offers readers a look at the finer details of the realist renderings of the animals and birds across the seven panels and thirty feet. There are also reproductions of the animal studies Jarvi created in the seventeen years leading up to the final work. Measuring 28 feet across…
I’ve spent 20 years researching Antarctica and polar history to learn about my father’s experiences on Admiral Richard E. Byrd’s III expedition or the USASE in 1939-41. I’ve been passionate about art, travel, and learning about other cultures for most of my life. I’m excited to say, I’ve worked on all the continents! My interests led me to a career as a leadership consultant, executive coach and team facilitator. Since 2020, I have had a dream job working with Antarctic scientists and teams, assisting them to manage stress and conflict in the field. With a lifetime of experience in the performing arts, my work inspires leaders to unlock their full potential and drive meaningful change.
I had no idea about what life is like in McMurdo Antarctica. On top of that, getting patterns of wearable art that you can knit yourself is a welcomed surprise.
Even though I’m not a crafter, I appreciate reading about the necessary camaraderie that’s needed to be comfortable in a remote place away from your family and friends.
Ever wonder what it's like to be a knitter living and working in Antarctica?
This stunningly photographed book offers 28 unique hat patterns from Antarctica's own knitters, plus stories that give a fascinating glimpse of life living 'on The Ice.'
Lynn Hamann and Christine Powell met and worked together in Antarctica for many years before deciding to write a book together. They are both accomplished knitters, and have developed a unique style born of necessity of working in the coldest, driest, windiest place on Earth.
This is Detective Chief Superintendent Fran Harman's first case in a series of six books. Months from retirement Kent-based Fran doesn't have a great life - apart from her work. She's menopausal and at the beck and call of her elderly parents, who live in Devon. But instead of lightening…
I’ve spent 20 years researching Antarctica and polar history to learn about my father’s experiences on Admiral Richard E. Byrd’s III expedition or the USASE in 1939-41. I’ve been passionate about art, travel, and learning about other cultures for most of my life. I’m excited to say, I’ve worked on all the continents! My interests led me to a career as a leadership consultant, executive coach and team facilitator. Since 2020, I have had a dream job working with Antarctic scientists and teams, assisting them to manage stress and conflict in the field. With a lifetime of experience in the performing arts, my work inspires leaders to unlock their full potential and drive meaningful change.
I feel heartbroken about this story of the Inuit guides who were a part of Robert Perry’s expedition to the North Pole. I feel gratitude that the expedition’s shadow side has been revealed in this intimate narrative.
It makes me wonder how many untold polar history stories are yet to be uncovered.
A striking, fascinatingly told novel based on the harrowing true story of Minik, an Eskimo boy seized in the name of exploration and brought to New York at the beginning of the 20th century.
In 1897, famed explorer Robert Peary took six Eskimos from their homes in Greenland to be "presented" to the American Museum of Natural History. Among the six were a father and a son. Soon, four were dead, including the father (whose bones, unbeknownst to the son, were put on display). One returned to Greenland. And the other -- the young boy -- remained, the only Eskimo…
I’m an author of queer historical fiction and I love to explore stories set on the sea. I adore the drama of it, the beauty, the awe, the timelessness, and the wild backdrop that allows characters to confront themselves and their journeys. Having lived by the sea all my life on an island rich with nautical and smuggling history, it has never been far away from me. I like to read a mixture of fiction and non-fiction; both have strongly influenced my own writing. The books on this list capture the diverse reasons I am drawn to sea tales!
As well as the characters who populate nautical stories and the sea itself, ships have such a vivid voice.
This non-fiction book follows HMS Erebusfrom her early journey to Antarctica to her eventual disappearance in the Canadian Arctic. I have a small obsession with polar exploration and this book captures the drama, the terror, and the mystery of it.
Michael Palin’s sensitivity to the historical issues and the real figures is very moving, especially the moment when the primary documents stop and all that is left to tell these men’s tales is a note in a desolate cairn.
I want to also sneakily recommend AMC’s adaptation of Dan Simmons’s The Terror, a TV show based on these events, which has some of my favourite writing in any piece of media.
_______________ THE SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER: the remarkable true story of the exploration ship featured in The Terror
In the early years of Queen Victoria's reign, HMS Erebus undertook two of the most ambitious naval expeditions of all time.
On the first, she ventured further south than any human had ever been. On the second, she vanished with her 129-strong crew in the wastes of the Canadian Arctic, along with the HMS Terror.
Her fate remained a mystery for over 160 years.
Then, in 2014, she was found.
This is her story. _______________ Now available: Michael Palin's North Korea Journals _______________…
Writer, broadcaster, speaker. I used to be stuck in fast forward, rushing through life instead of living it. I finally realised I needed to slow down when I started speed reading bedtime stories to my son: my version of Snow White had just three dwarves in it! I went on to slow down – and became, in the words of CBC Radio, “the world's leading evangelist for the Slow Movement.”
A gripping novel based on the life and death of John Franklin, a 19th century Arctic explorer. Franklin was by nature slow, and therefore out of step with the times. At school, other kids teased him for never having a ready comeback. Later, slowness became his superpower, a source of deep thinking, care, and wisdom. Franklin was an early avatar of the Slow movement!
Framing the life of the nineteenth-century explorer Sir John Franklin, this novel explores not only the adventures of his career, but also enters a world where the quality of life is considered in "slow motion", where ordinary experience becomes wholly new and unexpected.
Lenore James, a woman of independent means who has outlived three husbands, is determined to disentangle her brother Gilbert from the beguiling Charlotte Eden. Chafing against misogyny and racism in the post-Civil War South, Lenore learns that Charlotte’s husband is enmeshed in the re-enslavement schemes of a powerful judge, and…
There’s nothing like personal experience. You have to read the literature, it’s true. That’s how we’ve all met here at Shepherd. But you have to roll up your sleeves and get down to visiting, too, if you want to write about travel. I first approached the Arctic in 1991 and I return above sixty degrees north every year, although I must confess to a secret advantage; I married a Finn. We spend summers at a little cabin north of Helsinki. I know the region personally, I keep coming back, and I invite you, whenever you can, to come up and join us!
Barry Lopez was a nature writer and environmentalist.
He died on Christmas day 2020, and although we are fortunate to have his valedictory book Horizon, published when his traveling days were pretty well behind him, Arctic Dreams is the real deal, with Lopez as raconteur, but practitioner too, thoroughly in his element.
Lopez writes about exploration and the aurora, animals and the weather, ice and myth and survival and joy. He’s effortless. You’ll learn more than you knew there was to know about the high north, and the pleasure is in the learning.
If you must cut to the chase with these five books, Arctic
Dreams is the book, because Barry Lopez got things right.
'A master nature writer' (New York Times) provides the ultimate natural, social and cultural history of the Arctic landscape.
The author of Horizon's classic work explores the Arctic landscape and the hold it continues to exert on our imagination.
WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY ROBERT MACFARLANE
Lopez's journey across our frozen planet is a celebration of the Arctic in all its guises. A hostile landscape of ice, freezing oceans and dazzling skyscapes. Home to millions of diverse animals and people. The stage to massive migrations by land, sea and air. The setting of epic exploratory…
I’ve had a lifelong passion for all things Arctic that began in childhood as I devoured many tragic tales of doomed Arctic explorers. This fascination later merged with concern for human impacts on this fragile ecosystem. Though I hate the cold and suffer from vertigo, I participated in the 2017 Arctic Circle Summer Solstice Expedition that sailed Svalbard’s western shores. Among other experiences, I witnessed a massive glacier calving and walked on an ice floe. Determined to fully absorb Svalbard’s setting for my creative work, I spent two subsequent residencies in Longyearbyen—one in the dark season and one as the light returned—and I signed on for another expedition to circumnavigate the archipelago.
Like Brockmeier’s book, this book is in my top-five all-time novels. I can fall in love with a novel purely for its language, and Barrett’s ability to describe the settings her characters encounter is unparalleled. It, too, has a rare polar setting, this time aboard the ship the Narwhal bound for the Arctic in 1855 to find the remains of a previous, lost expedition. So visceral are her descriptions that they put me right back in the Arctic.
She’s also masterful at interleaving science and history with her characters’ desires without becoming didactic. One of her protagonists, the scholar-naturalist Erasmus Darwin Wells, screens the world and his philosophical musings through the lens of his scientific inclinations. I admire novels that manage to teach me something while not feeling as if the author is desperate to cram all the research s/he has acquired into the book. Barrett succeeds in avoiding this…
Capturing a crucial moment in the history of exploration-the mid-nineteenth century romance with the Arctic-Andrea Barrett's compelling novel tells the story of a fateful expedition. Through the eyes of the ship's scholar-naturalist, Erasmus Darwin Wells, we encounter the Narwhal's crew, its commander, and the far-north culture of the Esquimaux. In counterpoint, we meet the women left behind in Philadelphia, explorers only in imagination. Together, those who travel and those who stay weave a web of myth and mystery, finally discovering what they had not sought, the secrets of their own hearts.
I have been a Franklin geek for three decades and five of my fifty published novels and non-fiction books excavate the story of the greatest disaster in Arctic history. Reading Fitzjames’ letters for my first book introduced me to a friend I would have enjoyed going for a beer with and one of the greatest thrills of my life was waking one morning in September, 2014 to learn that the wreck of Fitzjames’ ship, Erebus, had been discovered. I am still excited to live in a time when the mystery might finally be solved—perhaps Fitzjames’ original journal lies amid the water-logged timbers off the shore where so many died.
Well illustrated and written in compelling and accessible prose, Finding Franklin is a wonderful, timely introduction to the expedition and to the extraordinary hold that the mystery of its disappearance has held on the Arctic imagination for more than a century-and-a-half. Potter is a leading expert on all things Franklin and has been intimately involved in the recent remarkable discoveries around King William Island. There are few better companions at this exciting time when it seems the answers to the mystery are at our fingertips.
In 2014 media around the world buzzed with news that an archaeological team from Parks Canada had located and identified the wreck of HMS Erebus, the flagship of Sir John Franklin's lost expedition to find the Northwest Passage. Finding Franklin outlines the larger story and the cast of detectives from every walk of life that led to the discovery, solving one of the Arctic's greatest mysteries. In compelling and accessible prose, Russell Potter details his decades of work alongside key figures in the era of modern searches for the expedition and elucidates how shared research and ideas have led to…
Magnolia Merryweather, a horse breeder, is eager to celebrate Christmas for the first time after the Civil War ended even as she grows her business. She envisions a calm, prosperous life ahead after the terror of the past four years. Only, all of her plans are thrown into disarray when…
I have been passionate about Polar exploration since I was a boy. My father was a Nordic Olympic skier who introduced me to the exploits of Norwegian and Scandinavian explorers when I was very young. Later, I traveled to Greenland in 2003 and was blown away by the remoteness, the dramatic ice and mountains, and the incredible toughness of the people who have explored the regions and carved out life there.
I love a great cradle-to-grave biography, and gives the life story of Roald Amundsen, in my opinion, the greatest Polar explorer in history. I gained so much insight into the man who was driven to explore the most extreme places on earth, the Polar regions.
I relished the deep insights into Amundsen’s character and personality, which helped me better understand one of the more misunderstood figures in exploration history.
The Last Viking unravels the life of the man who stands head and shoulders above all those who raced to map the last corners of the world. In 1900, the four great geographical mysteries- the Northwest Passage, the Northeast Passage, the South Pole, and the North Pole- remained blank spots on the globe. Within twenty years Roald Amundsen would claim all four prizes. Renowned for his determination and technical skills, both feared and beloved by his men, Amundsen is a legend of the heroic age of exploration, which shortly thereafter would be tamed by technology, commerce, and publicity. Feted in…
