Brilliant
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Mr. Pascoe, I'm in total agreement. Barrow's Boys was an outstanding piece of work. The Sword and The Cross equally compelling. Killing Dragons and Ninety Degrees North further concreted a substantial reputation.
If you're a Fleming fan and have read his previous work, Tales of Endurance won't come as much of a surprise for you - most of the tales have already been told in the works mentioned above. I'm sure the original reviewer is right - the tales here could each individually fill many volumes (and have done over the centuries!). However, to chronicle such exploration in absolute detail is not Fleming's intention - these tales are brief, yes, but that doesn't detract from their quality. Fleming paints a very real setting and grounds his characters well in time and place. There is a wonderfully dry humour that I can relate too also.
If you're looking for a serious book on, say, Columbus, then this won't be for you. If you want a book you can dip into and experience a myriad of colourful characters (including some downright nutters) and their scrapes and adventures, this book is wholly entertaining
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Excellent as usual
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I felt I had to review here, if only to give a counter opinion to the one shown already.
I read Fleming's 'Barrow's Boys' a couple of years ago, and instantly considered it the best book in its genre I've ever read. Then I read his '90 Degrees North' and had to admit Barrow's Boys had competition.
This is more of the same from an excellent storyteller, and enthralling and funny throughout.
In this, as in his aforementioned titles, Fleming has the ability to make even those stories you already knew gripping. I'm an author myself (a writer of comedy books) and I find that Fleming's effortless humour has me chuckling at situations I doubt I've ever laughed at before.
He's made history fun, and I would recommend this book to anybody.
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A Tale of Endurance itself...
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Billing itself as 'forty-five gripping accounts of some of the most amazing feats in the history of exploration' leads one to expect a certain standard. Fleming unfortunately has not lived up to it; whilst the tales are indeed amazing, the narrative is turgid and rarely allows the reader to get close to the historical characters. Lack of feeling and only brief accounts of tremendous events that profoundly changed individuals, mean there are significant holes in the book. It is probably due to the ambitious scale of the work that such holes exist. The book is packed with maps- at least one for each tale. However; they are often replicated with only minor alterations, fail to show the routes that travellers took (leaving this jigsaw down to the reader to work out from the confused narrative), and often miss out important place names mentioned in the text. Failure to provide explanation of reoccuring scientific themes, ie. the difficulties of working out longitude/latitude, is annoying and leaves the reader as mystified as the early explorers! Full of fascinating and worthy subject matter, badly told.
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