Explorers by Andrea De Porti
This photo- and fact-filled book, in which nearly every page is a generously illustrated double gatefold, lands on the table with an undeniable thud and details 58 expeditions from the past 150 years-from Robert Peary and Matthew Henson's trek to the North Pole in 1909 to Edmund Hillary's 1953 climb up Everest (called by Tibetans "the mother goddess of the world") to Neil Armstrong's "one small step" onto the moon in 1969. De Porti, a writer and editor for Charta and art director of Alumina, chose these stories for their "cultural and scientific significance" and combines often-unseen images (readers will find reproductions of pages from travel journals, maps and sketches among the hundreds of archival photos) with explorer biographies and travel narratives. De Porti recounts failed as well as successful expeditions, and it's the former that resonate most, notably the doomed adventure of Robert Falcon Scott, who, after reaching the South Pole, discovered Roald Amundsen had planted the Norwegian flag there barely a month prior. Scott died on the return journey. Though some explorers' intentions were more noble than others (expanding colonial interests played no small role in many expeditions), the creative way these journeys are presented will impress armchair adventurers.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition. 

From Booklist
*Starred Review* De Porti points out in a preface that when Yuri Gagarin orbited the earth in Vostok I in just over 90 minutes in 1961, he was able to travel the same distance as the HMS Challenger in its three-and-a-half-year voyage around the world, which began in 1872. From the middle of the nineteenth century, as the author indicates, there are historical documents, accounts, and reports of expeditions, and photographs, and many of them are extraordinarily evocative images, despite their having been taken with primitive equipment. The story of exploration is a story told in pictures, and this book contains hundreds of rare archival photos, both color and black and white, spread over vertical and horizontal gatefolds. The 53 stories here, De Porti writes, have been selected for their historical and scientific importance and also for their "sheer fascination." Some voyages are well known--those of Charles Lindbergh, Roald Amundsen, Robert Stott, Thor Heyerdahl, and Neil Armstrong. Some explorers are little known--such as Katherine Routledge, who explored the mysterious stone statues and the ancient culture that had erected them on Easter Island; Maria Reiche, who for 40 years studied the ancient archaeological sites of South America; and Vittorio Sella, who photographed the highest peaks, towering cliffs, and glaciers in America, Asia, and Africa. Readers will be fascinated by these journeys. George Cohen

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El Capitan by Daniel Duane
Like a younger, funnier Peter Matthiessen, Duane brought an easily worn literary and environmental seriousness to his beautiful 1996 book on surfing, Caught Inside: A Surfer!s Year on the California Coast and followed with a surprisingly entertaining novel about rock climbers, Looking for Mo. In his new book, Duane is again a knowledgeable but scrupulously unheroic participant narrator, conveying the wonder and self-torture of his subject without lapsing into glorifying cliche. El Capitan basically draws on the research that went into Duane!s climbing novel, re-creating the stirring assents of the great 3000' granite chunk in Yosemite Valley known as El Cap, which is pictured throughout in dizzying photos. No one conquered the Cap until the late 1950s, but Duane shows the evolution since of the rock!s fabled routes"the Salathe, Pacific Ocean Wall, the Nose"and the change in emphasis from who will be first to whose ascent will be fastest or purest. Duane skillfully contrasts the spiritual fathers of modern rock climbing, from Warren Harding (whose 1958 effort wasn!t the prettiest or shortest on record but was first) to the more aesthetic-minded climbers Royal Robbins and Yvon Chuinard, up until the recent free climb attempts of Scott Burk. Recommended for sports and outdoor collections."Nathan Ward, Library Journal 
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc. 

From Booklist
From a San Francisco climber and journalist comes this interesting history of one of the world's most challenging rocks: El Capitan, nestled in California's Yosemite Valley, a sheer granite wall 3,000 feet high that has captured the imaginations of mountaineers since its discovery in 1851. One man climbed El Cap 52 times in 12 years. In 1958, Warren Harding spent 45 days on the rock; nowadays really hardy mountaineers can get from bottom to top in about five hours. Duane, who has spent some time on El Cap himself (in 1991, he made three unsuccessful attempts to get to the top), tells the rock's story by introducing us to the men who dedicated their lives to conquering it. This is a dramatic book, full of derring-do, near misses, and thrills and chills, ideal for readers of real-life adventures (like The Perfect Storm or Into Thin Air) and armchair mountaineers. David Pitt