On to Travel

I have moved back into non-fiction for one of my last sorties into that area of the library. The mammoth travel section is bursting with guide books, so it's quite hard to find a prose book I can actually read. I selected Racing With Death: Douglas Mawson - Antarctic Explorer by Beau Riffenburgh. It's not a travel book at all, it's a biography of a largely forgotten Antarctic explorer. It's actually quite good, but he was mainly remembered in his lifetime for an especially daring trek across the ice when everyone but him died. I am not sure in any way it was especially notable and he'll always go down as a footnote compared to the likes of Scott and Shakleton, and the rest of his life was really quite ordinary baring the years in the Antarctic. Nevertheless, it's a decent book and gets 8 out of 10.

 

Fall Down Seven Times

Fall Down Seven Times, Get Up Eight is a book by Japanese teenager Naoki Higashida about autism. My daughter is autistic so I could relate to some of it. However, at times it lapsed into the specifics of his family life and was repetitive. 5/10

The library has re-opened so I can get cracking reading again!