To The Ends Of The Earth

Account of the Transglobe Expedition, 1979-1982, led by Ranulph Fiennes. This was the first expedition to circumnavigate the earth via both poles.

A new one-volume edition of this classic sequence of sea novels set in the early nineteenth century, about a voyage from England to Australia. Rites of Passage (Winner of the Booker Prize) 'The work of a master at the full stretch of his age and wisdom.' The Times Close Quarters 'A feat of imaginative reconstruction, as vivid as a dream.' Daily Mail Fire Down Below 'Laden to the waterline with a rich cargo of practicalities and poetry, pain and hilarity, drama and exaltation.' Sunday Times

For some 24 years in the 1500s map makers included Australia on their world maps - long before Australia was actually 'discovered' by Europeans, according to conventional history. This book presents evidence that the ancient Greeks landed in the Americas and circumnavigated the world more than 1300 years before the voyage of Magellan. This great expedition was recorded by the Greeks and the resultant maps and scrolls stored in the Great Library of Alexandria. There they remained until 340-345AD when Roman troops removed selected items and took them back to Italy. History sadly records that in 390AD the then Bishop of Alexandria ordered the library's entire contents, some 700,000 scrolls, maps and other artefacts, burnt or smashed. This research traces what really happened in those turbulent times and explains how some of these records were not destroyed but remained intact for map makers to rediscover more than one thousand years later. Importantly, it explores how the magnificent works of ancient master map maker Claudius Ptolemy were found and redrawn in the 1300s. Strangely, though the original ancient maps were found, it is clear that those who drew new maps from them did not fully understand the extent of what the ancient Greek voyagers had achieved.

Do you need a little adventure in your life? Could you use a laugh with a helping of inspiration? Then strap your boots on with this amazing travelogue as Malcolm Hunter, a born storyteller, journeys with Jesus across East and North Africa among the nomadic peoples of the Sahara and beyond. Jesus is always on the move. The question is: If we follow Him, where will we end up? An expert on nomadic peoples, Malcolm Hunter shares stories from a lifetime of working in some of the world’s most remote, colorful, and neglected communities. In the early 1960s Malcolm and his wife, Jean, arrived in Ethiopia with only their professional skills—medicine and engineering—and a desire to show God’s love to those in need. Over the next forty years God would lead them across Africa, through lush hills and scorched bush, to a dozen people groups who hadn’t heard the gospel. Wherever the Hunters went, they found that God had been there first. This book is full of astonishing true accounts of Jesus preparing the world’s least reached peoples to encounter Him. Visions, dreams, miracles, shocking customs, and even human blunders and tragedies—God used all these and more to open a way to share the good news. Honest, hopeful, and never far from laughter, Malcolm invites us to consider anew what we can expect when we follow Jesus—wherever He leads.

From Sir John Franklin's doomed 1845 search for the Northwest Passage to early twentieth-century sprints to the South Pole, polar expeditions produced an extravagant archive of documents that are as varied as they are engaging. As the polar ice sheets melt, fragments of this archive are newly emergent. In The News at the Ends of the Earth Hester Blum examines the rich, offbeat collection of printed ephemera created by polar explorers. Ranging from ship newspapers and messages left in bottles to menus and playbills, polar writing reveals the seamen wrestling with questions of time, space, community, and the environment. Whether chronicling weather patterns or satirically reporting on penguin mischief, this writing provided expedition members with a set of practices to help them survive the perpetual darkness and harshness of polar winters. The extreme climates these explorers experienced is continuous with climate change today. Polar exploration writing, Blum contends, offers strategies for confronting and reckoning with the extreme environment of the present.

"Cat Cochran took nothing from her ex-husband but a determination to earn her own way in the world. Her cameras provided her with the means of making a living. Yet no matter how successful she became, she still dreamed of warmth in the cold center of the night. Embittered by too much money and too little love, Travis Danvers sailed the seas on his ship, Wind Warrior. Though women pursued him, drawn by his wealth and sensuality, nowhere did he find a woman who could teach him to love, until he met Cat." -- Back cover.

A sharp and provocative new essay collection from the award-winning author of Freedom and The Corrections The essayist, Jonathan Franzen writes, is like “a fire-fighter, whose job, while everyone else is fleeing the flames of shame, is to run straight into them.” For the past twenty-five years, even as his novels have earned him worldwide acclaim, Franzen has led a second life as a risk-taking essayist. Now, at a moment when technology has inflamed tribal hatreds and the planet is beset by unnatural calamities, he is back with a new collection of essays that recall us to more humane ways of being in the world. Franzen’s great loves are literature and birds, and The End of the End of the Earth is a passionate argument for both. Where the new media tend to confirm one’s prejudices, he writes, literature “invites you to ask whether you might be somewhat wrong, maybe even entirely wrong, and to imagine why someone else might hate you.” Whatever his subject, Franzen’s essays are always skeptical of received opinion, steeped in irony, and frank about his own failings. He’s frank about birds, too (they kill “everything imaginable”), but his reporting and reflections on them—on seabirds in New Zealand, warblers in East Africa, penguins in Antarctica—are both a moving celebration of their beauty and resilience and a call to action to save what we love. Calm, poignant, carefully argued, full of wit, The End of the End of the Earth provides a welcome breath of hope and reason.

Calvinist missionaries. If you think that sounds like an oxymoron, you’re not alone. Yet a close look at John Calvin’s life and writings reveals a man who was passionate about the spread of the gospel and the salvation of sinners. From training pastors at his Genevan Academy to sending missionaries to the jungles of Brazil, Calvin consistently sought to encourage and equip Christians to take the good news of salvation to the very ends of the earth. In this carefully researched book, Michael Haykin and Jeffrey Robinson clear away longstanding stereotypes related to the Reformed tradition and Calvin’s theological heirs, highlighting the Reformer’s neglected missional vision and legacy.