Hell With A Capital H

Nov 14, 2024 10:11 PM

Author:Katherine Lambert

On 29 March 1912, as Scott and his two companions lay dying in their tent, elsewhere on the polar ice-cap six members of his ill-fated expedition were fighting for their lives. This was the so-called Northern Party, hand-picked by Scott to undertake his most significant programme of scientific research. The unsung hero of this group was Dr Murray Levick, whose attention to diet and mental and physical fitness played a major part in their survival. The doctor was a sensitive recorder and a talented photographer, it is on his previously unpublished diaries, monographs, photographs and sketches that this book is based. The six men were landed by Terra Nova in January 1911 at Cape Adare, 450 miles north of Scott's base camp at Cape Evans. They spent nearly a year there, living in a rudimentary hut, surveying and collecting specimens from the beautiful but inhospitable bay and shoreline fringed by inaccessible mountains. They were then dropped off mid-way between the two Capes to continue their work. The ship was due to pick them up on 17 February 1912. A month later she still hadn't come, and the men were forced to face the Antarctic winter in an igloo dug out of a snowdrift on 'Inexpressible Island'. After spending six-and-a-half months entombed in their underground ice-cave,in conditions of unimaginable physical and mental hardship,

Reviews

Hell with a Capital H is a wonderful book and the result of painstaking research. Katherine Lambert has produced a well-balanced analysis of Scott and of many of his expediiton team. The main focus of her gripping story centres on the horrendous tribulations of the isolated Northern Party. Better than any of the many Scott biographies I have read, this book brings out the real characters of the participants and the interplay between them as they dally in their icy and all but fatal Hell.

—— Ranulph Fiennes

This book should be read by every expeditioner and armchair traveller.

—— Col John Blashford-Snell OBE of the Scientific Exploration Society

...her style is engaging, her text is easy to read, and her advice is accessible to the layperson

—— Library Journal

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—— Tom Chatfield , Observer

McGonigal brilliantly deconstructs the components of good game design before parlaying them into a recipe for changing the offline, 'real' world'

—— Literary Review

She brilliantly links the growing scholarship on happiness to the gimmicks and tricks that commercial game designers devise to engage their febrile audiences

—— Pat Kane , Belfast Telegraph

I found as I read through her book I had already begin [sic] to feel empowered and make notes on the games I'd like to look into. Gamers can change reality - McGonigal proves that...

—— Keri Allan , Engineering & Technology

As soon as I started this book, I was gripped with curiosity

—— William Leith , Spectator

Thomas Wright's lively little book on Harvey's revolutionary idea is a panegyric to the man's whirring mind, and to the excitements of thinking more generally

—— Helen Brown , Daily Telegraph

Excellent and often bloodthirsty... A highly readable account of a great Englishman

—— Tablet

A vivid biography of William Harvey, which reveals his complex character

—— Patricia Fara , BBC History Magazine

It’s a pretty gruesome story – told very well here by Thomas Wright

—— William Leith , Evening Standard

An engaging and lively account of an endlessly curious man

—— Independent

A fascinating window into the complex emergent urban future. This book is an extremely sophisticated, often devastatingly witty and ironic, interpretation of what is possible over the next two decades

—— Saskia Sassen (author of TERRITORY, AUTHORITY, RIGHTS)

Throw out your old atlas. The new version is here

—— Walter Kirn (author of UP IN THE AIR)

Kasarda ... and Lindsay convincingly put the airport at the centre of modern urban life

—— Economist

Highly recommended

—— Library Journal

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