{"product_id":"2940157741259","title":"The Shameless Diary of an Explorer (Annotated)","description":"\"[Dunn was] a man bent on adventure and ready to face the dangers and hardships that adventure brings.\"—The New York Times Book Review\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"A classic on exploration. The odd thing about Dunn is that he was the most literary of the writers he affected to despise, the most idealistic. Dunn has written novels, or rather he has overwritten—book after book of beautiful truth. He and he alone of them all was an artist for art's sake.—Lincoln Steffens, McClure's magazine.\"\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eAn honest, funny, and utterly unforgettable classic of Arctic exploration.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eWhen young reporter Robert Steed Dunn signs on to an early attempt to climb Denali (then Mt. McKinley) in 1903, he expects heroic struggles against snow, ice, and altitude. What he delivers instead is something far more unusual: a brutally candid, darkly comic portrait of a small expedition coming apart at the seams. In a genre crowded with chest thumping tales of glory, The Shameless Diary of an Explorer stands out for its unvarnished honesty, modern feel, and razor sharp wit.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eDunn records everything: the breathtaking Alaskan landscape, the constant danger, the crushing labor of hauling loads toward a seemingly impossible summit—and the bickering, sulks, private bravado, and petty jealousies of men who have been too long together in cold and hunger. He spares no one, least of all himself. The result reads less like a stiff Edwardian travelogue and more like a contemporary Krakauer style narrative: propulsive, self aware, often laugh out loud funny even as the stakes remain deadly serious.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThis failed 1903 attempt was only the beginning for Dunn. He had already survived a harrowing 1898 expedition, and he would go on to explore the remote Kamchatka River, report from the front lines of World War I for the New York Post, serve as a U.S. naval intelligence officer, and ride with General John \"Black Jack\" Pershing into Mexico in pursuit of Pancho Villa. But it is here, in this \"shameless\" diary, that his gifts as a stylist and observer of human nature are at their sharpest.","brand":"BIG BYTE BOOKS","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":46545995694321,"sku":"2940157741259","price":2.99,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0674\/5433\/7265\/files\/2940157741259_p0.jpg?v=1774995744","url":"https:\/\/shop.barnesandnoble.com\/products\/2940157741259","provider":"Barnes \u0026 Noble","version":"1.0","type":"link"}