Christopher Ondaatje
First Contact
The Oxford Book of Exploration
By Robin Hanbury-Tenison (ed)
Oxford University Press 576pp £16.99 order from our bookshop
Robin Hanbury-Tenison’s Oxford Book of Exploration, originally published in hardback in 1993, was the very first anthology of explorers’ writings. There are, of course, a great many travel anthologies (notably Eric Newby’s excellent Book of Travellers’ Tales) and volumes on exploration in general (such as John Keay’s excellent History of World Exploration), but Hanbury-Tenison was the first to deal exclusively with explorers. For this revised paperback edition he has included new adventurers, amended other entries, and added a new section, ‘Above and Below’, on explorers of our oceans and caves, and of our solar system.
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