By telling the whole story and foremost the astonishing things those two ships, their men and the respective figures which later sailed into dissolution Michael Palin draws a more complete picture and kind of rehabilitates everything connected to these figures. I just knew the names by the accounts of their last expedition when Sir John Franklin, Captain Crozier and some 130 men froze and starved and died, the two ships disappeared and the mystery left by their deaths never to be solved. In a way, Palin manages to draw a very different picture of the EREBUS and TERROR. What I like and what I dislike about this bookĪnd here we are, this is from my point of view what makes this book so valuable. In fact, EREBUS and TERROR did have a life before the doomed last expedition with Sir John Franklin! The Antarctic voyages which earned them their fame and some 40 years of rich naval history – that´s the true contribution of this book. Where I – up until now – only new EREBUS and TERROR by their accomplishments during their fateful last journey into oblivion searching for the Northwest Passage Palin opens up a whole new universe of even more gripping and fantastic stories of these ships. On the other hand, it definitely lives up to it´s title. Michael Palin, a traveller on its own, visited a lot of the EREBUS-connected sites And even more than that, because, what I love about Palin, his fine sense of the comical, his short but powerful commentaries and his very British – but modern and very humanistic – view and judgement of things make this book a literary marvel. It is surely a true and wholesome scientific account. I was compelled by the sheer amount of researching work that must have gone into that book: Palin´s work is certainly not a leisurely written side-project, it was a multi-year long mission of painstaking research, of a meticulously puzzling together the bits and pieces. Palin, that´s for sure, spent a whole lot of time roaming the archives of the Admiralty, National Geographic Society and many more libraries, he travelled to the remote places and sceneries where EREBUS and her crew once landed. The book comes as a thick, 322 page compendium. Review of Michael Palin´s “EREBUS – The Story of a Ship” And now a book about the TERROR, what a great news! Since the Eighties he was travelling the world accompanied by a camera, mostly of the BBC, and his documentaries “Around the World in 80 Days”, “From Pole to Pole” or the re-enacted Hemingway´s Great Loop “Full Circle” have been succeeded to render absolute cult status. He is great actor and a far greater storyteller. More than a Monty Python: I admire Michael Palin since his “In 80 Days around the World”-seriesįor those who don´t know Sir Michael Palin yet (and I am afraid there are some) let´s try to sum it up in one sentence. Now I have read through, and I must say, it´s a great book: “EREBUS – The Story of a Ship” by Michael Palin. Since I had been made aware of the fact that Michael Palin has written another book I was excited, since I had known that it was to be a maritime story, I was keen on hold it in my hands at last. I was exceptionally excited when the DHL-guy was ringing the doorbell and handed over the sandy brown mailbox: As I haven´t been ordering anything the last days but one single book, it was clear what it was containing.
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