Demonstrating that the qualities that brought an individual soclose to his goal were often the same ones that drove him to fakesuccess, Great Exploration Hoaxes is history at its best:entertaining, provocative, and revealing of human nature.
Did Peary reach the North Pole? Was Admiral Byrd the first to
fly over it? Did Frederick Cook actually make the first ascent of
Mt. McKinley? Spanning 450 years of history, Great Exploration
Hoaxes tells the spellbinding stories of ten men who pursued glory
at any cost even the truth. Acclaimed author and explorer David
Roberts delves deeply into the psychology behind the stunt and asks
why these individuals, all of whom were exceptionally able, would
perpetrate fraud on such a grand and public scale and defend it to
their deaths, even in the face of damning evidence, and why these
dubious achievements are still so hotly debated, often hundreds of
years afterward.
Demonstrating that the qualities that brought an individual so
close to his goal were often the same ones that drove him to fake
success, Great Exploration Hoaxes is history at its best:
entertaining, provocative, and revealing of human nature.
David Roberts is the author of thirteen books, the most recent of
which are A Newer World: Kit Carson, John C. Fremont, and the
Claiming of the American West and True Summit: What Really Happened
on the Legendary Ascent of Annapurna. He was also responsible for
the rediscovery of the lost Arctic classic In the Land of White
Death, by Valerian Albanov, published in English for the first time
in 2000 by The Modern Library.
In the 1960s and 1970s, Roberts led or co-led thirteen Alaskan
mountaineering expeditions, making such first ascents as the west
face of Mount Huntington, Shot Tower, and the direct north face of
Denali.