He received the BAFTA Fellowship in 2013 and was appointed by Queen Elizabeth II as a Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in 2000, and was made a knight in 2019. He was a member of the Monty Python comedy group. I admire Amundsen greatly.Sir Michael Edward Palin KCMG CBE FRGS FRSGS FRSL ( / ˈ p eɪ l ɪ n/ born ) is an English actor, comedian, writer, and television presenter. ![]() Ironic that Amundsen was also the first man to navigate the North West Passage. Scott didn’t listen and paid the ultimate price, although unlike Franklin he didn’t take every member of the expedition down with him. The arrogance that “we know best”reared its head again in 1911 when Amundsen was first to the pole using clothing and transport based on Inuit experience. My opinion of Charles Dickens has gone down a few notches after hearing what he had to say about the Inuit people. By treating the knowledge of Arctic survival perfected over millennia by the Inuit people with the greatest distain and ignoring their memories of meetings with survivors of the expedition, la great opportunity to save at least some of them was lost. The sheer bravery of the participants and their discipline and skill in the events recounted is mind boggling but in a way so is the mindset of the British establishment that they had the answer to every problem. Perhaps that’s something Audible could work on, a way of digitising illustrations that could be downloaded for a fee to use in conjunction with listening to the relevant book. The downside of course is that illustrations in the printed version are not available to the listener. Listening to the author reading his own words added a whole new dimension for me. Where do you start? Bill Bryson, no mean teller of a travelling tale, was bowled over by this book and exclaimed “Beyond terrific. This is a wonderfully evocative and epic account, written by a master explorer and storyteller. ![]() To help tell the story, he has travelled to various locations across the world - Tasmania, the Falklands, the Canadian Arctic - to search for local information, and to experience at first hand the terrain and the conditions that would have confronted the Erebus and her crew. And he vividly recounts the experiences of the men who first stepped ashore on Antarctica's Victoria Land, and those who, just a few years later, froze to death one by one in the Arctic wastes as rescue missions desperately tried to reach them. He explores the intertwined careers of the men who shared its journeys: the dashing James Clark Ross who charted much of the 'Great Southern Barrier' and oversaw some of the earliest scientific experiments to be conducted there and the troubled John Franklin, who at the age of 60 and after a chequered career, commanded the ship on its final, disastrous expedition. ![]() ![]() Now Michael Palin - former Monty Python stalwart and much-loved television globetrotter - brings this extraordinary ship back to life, following it from its launch in 1826 to the epic voyages of discovery that led to glory in the Antarctic and to ultimate catastrophe in the Arctic. Its whereabouts had been a mystery for over a century and a half. It was broken at the stern and covered in a woolly coat of underwater vegetation. In September 2014 the wreck of a sailing vessel was discovered at the bottom of the sea in the frozen wastes of the Canadian Arctic. Random House presents the audiobook edition of Erebus, written and read by Michael Palin.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |