In 1915, while the Great War embroiled Europe, the world waited for news of the Antarctic explorer Ernest Shackleton's latest expedition but had given him up for lost. Shackleton's near-miraculous survival for nine months on the ice-packed Antarctic seas -- capped with an open-boat journey across more than 700 miles of the most dangerous weather in the South Atlantic -- has made him synonymous with courage and endurance. Roland Huntford, acclaimed biographer of Robert Falcon Scott and Roald Amundsen, masterfully chronicles the life of one of the last great Edwardian heroes, from his Anglo-Irish childhood to his rivalry with Scott and Amundsen in the quest for the pole. Although Shackleton was knighted for having reached "Farthest South," a hundred miles from his goal, in 1909, he was as much a social adventurer as an explorer, not to mention an inveterate womanizer and dubious financier. Whatever the mix of hero and rogue in his character, as one of his colleagues summed him up, "When you are in a hopeless situation, when there seems no way out, get down on your knees and pray for Shackleton." Book jacket.