Books like Below the Convergence by Alan Gurney

A gripping 1922 memoir detailing Apsley Cherry‑Garrard’s firsthand experience of Robert Falcon Scott’s ill‑fated 1910‑1913 Terra Nova expedition to the South Pole.

Sir Ernest Shackleton’s first‑hand diary of the 1914‑17 Imperial Trans‑Antarctic Expedition, detailing the Endurance’s crushing by ice, the crew’s nine‑month ordeal on drifting ice, and their daring survival against the polar wilderness.

Mutiny, shipwreck, a new farthest north, bureaucratic ineptitude, cannibalism. A story that features all these elements promises more than enough excitement, but Guttridge (Icebound, etc.) doesn't corral all the pieces of his story into a coherent narrative until the end, when the stark and tragic facts take on their own momentum. The Greely Expedition set out in 1881 to conduct scientific observations at Lady Franklin Bay, a remote spot on Ellesmere Island in the Canadian Arctic. Under the command of U.S. Army Lieut. Adolphus Greely, the expedition was part of a multinational research effort in which several countries were making scientific observations. But funds were hard to obtain for the expedition and, more importantly, for the relief parties that were sent out the following year to cache supplies in the event the Greely party had to retreat southward. The events themselves are gripping, and Guttridge shows how Greely's men steadily lost faith in their commander. Greely's most dependable sergeant wrote in his journal: "Why does the United States government persist in sending a fool in command of an Arctic expedition?" But Guttridge delves too deeply into the details of bureaucratic infighting and provisioning and fails to successfully evoke the rigors and beauties of the Arctic climate. He relies heavily on the words that the officers and men wrote in their journals, which give readers a sense of the inexorable breakdown of discipline and morale in the face of poor leadership, but don't offer any lingering sense of the men who wrote them or of the conditions to which they ultimately succumbed.

A historical account of a 19th-century explorer who disproves the myth of the gorilla.

Many outstanding men -- €”James Bruce, Richard Francis Burton, David Livingstone, Henry Morton Stanley, and others -- €”won lasting fame from their African journeys. Africa Explored collects their amazing tales of treks into the unknown. These tales of Europeans in Africa before the wave of colonialism mix exotic sights and startling customs with sympathetic meetings of Africa's people and scenes of sublime beauty. Africa Explored relates Mungo Park's being robbed and left for dead in the West African desert, then saved by repeated acts of kindness; Burton and Speke's search for the legendary Mountains of the Moon that fed the Nile; Alexander Laing's fatal voyage to Timbuktu; Livingston's journeys up the Zambezi River; German missionary Johannes Rebmann's astonishment at beholding the snow-capped peak of Kilimanjaro; and other incredible encounters with strange animals, the slave trade, crippling diseases, and desert nomads.