About book Cherry: A Life Of Apsley Cherry-Garrard (2002)
I read Cherry-Garrard’s The Worst Journey in the World many years ago without learning anything about the author except that the book itself was as good a tale as I’d heard.Sara Wheeler’s biography is also a great book, well-written and sympathetic but man, he was a tragic character. He was, I think, the youngest and an unlikely member of Scott’s last Antarctic expedition in 1911; it was the high point in his life and nothing ever again came close. He was a privileged member of the upper-class but did not actually do anything beyond administer his family’s estate, which he didn’t like anyway and gradually sold off. It took him 10 years to write the definitive TWJITW and ever after he would keep rewriting the introduction in response to various criticisms and the publication of other books on the expedition. He was locked in depression throughout his life, mostly agonizing about whether he could have saved Scott (perhaps he was suffering from PTSD? Not sure, although he even appeared to benefit from ECT for a while). But that’s really all he did – obsess about what might have been or been done differently.
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