Many lessons can be learned from the explorers who came before us, and no greater period of intense exploration occurred than in the period from 1910 to 1914, when humans struggled at great cost to reach the South Pole. These explorers included Norwegian Roald Amundsen (first to reach the pole) and, from England, Robert Scott (second to reach the pole), and finally the epic expedition of Ernest Shackleton, who never actually reached Antarctica, but survived, along with all of his men, one of the greatest exploration epics of all time. Richard Farr’s book, Emperors of the Ice, is a fascinating account of Scott’s tragic retreat from the pole—not from the perspective of Scott, as recorded in The Worst Journey in the World, but from the perspective of that book’s author,…
