The story itself was fascinating. Reading of how Shackleton and his men learned to cope with spending the winter adrift on the ice was intriguing.

This telling of the story, however, was not great. The attempts at building suspense fell flat. And, since the author wanted to present the historical facts as a struggle of man against nature, he tended to give a certain slant to things. The men of the expedition (most of them anyway) came out bigger and more noble than the norm. And nature tended to be portrayed as evil. The orcas were sinister, the seal leopards ugly, and the mountain ridges wicked. And I'm not sure how much trust I can put in the extrapolations that he made - where he described people's thoughts and motives.

Also, the edition that I read was released to be sold in Christian bookstores. So I couldn't escape the niggling suspicion that it had been re-edited to present a more 'Christian' viewpoint.