Shipwreck at the Bottom of the World

Armstrong’s non-fiction text is engaging like few others. I read a lot of non-fiction literature – sometimes it is work, sometimes it is for entertainment (generally baseball related), and other times it is for personal learning. Almost always, if the non-fiction literature I am reading recounts a story, like Shipwreck at the Bottom of the World does, I generally know what is going to happen at the end, and read along to learn more about the subject. In this case, I knew the end result of Shackleton and his men – I knew before reading that they would survive. All this same, this book is a page-turner. Armstrong creates suspense in a text where the end is known already.

It is clear that Armstrong has dedicated a substantial amount of time to researching the subject matter in this text, and she is able to expertly capture a surprising amount of detail from the ill-fated journey of Schackleton and his men. The photos that accompany this text are incredible, and go a long way in making the text more “real.” When seeing images of the men and from the voyage, a very intimate feeling is created for the reader – it makes it easier to connect with the characters in an authentic way… I think that this is because it is easy to lose track of the fact that the story being told in this text is in fact non-fiction. It seems at times to be too amazing to be true, but the photos serve as a reminder to the reader that what is being told really happened. Additionally, photos like these can serve to show us how those involved really are individuals. It is so easy to gloss over history and not relate with or connect with the individual’s role or experience – to look at history as something bland and impersonal, to fail to make any personal connection with those involved in the history being made.

Shortly before my grandfather passed away, he invited me to look at his collection of photos from WWII. For my grandfather, this was something that was very private. Aside from a few offhand comments, he never spoke about the war, or his experiences in it. Not even my father had seen the photos I looked at with him at that time. While we were together, it struck me in a powerful way like never before that the young faces in the photos I was looking at had lives and dreams that were equally as complex and vivid as my own. It is perhaps easier to not think of war and soldiers in such a way, but seeing pictures of my grandfather pal around with his buddies in his early twenties (he was roughly my own age in most of the photos, which made the connection even more profound) made for a very intimate connection.

In the same way, seeing photos of the men in the journey of the Endurance brought faces and a sense of intimacy to the stories of those involved. They cannot exist as obscure figures in history. In conjunction with this, Armstrong shares personal details about the crew, which make the connection that the reader feels to the characters even stronger. In all, this is a very enjoyable text. It was fun to learn about the journey of the men, and to learn about the Antarctic in this way. The only concern that I may have in recommending this book to adolescent readers is the complete lack of female characters- though true to history, it may perhaps be an obstacle for a younger female reader to engage with the text.