Pole Dance

On 28th December 2002, 27-year-old Tom Avery became the youngest - and fastest - Briton to reach the South Pole, having arrived on foot from the Hercules inlet in a world-record time of 45 days and six hours. Written in diary form, in the present tense, this chronicle of modern polar expedition is unusual for that fact alone. The original diary Tom kept has been edited as little as possible in the hope of retaining as much of the drama and emotion that Tom and his three other team members experienced en route: the team's use of mini-parachutes that powered them across the ice; the breaking of no less than 17 ski-bindings on the journey; the privations of frostbite, altitude sickness and crevasse falls; even the attempts to sabotage the expedition's sponsorship by a rival explorer. Tom Avery's Pole Dance incorporates comparisons with other South Pole expeditions into his own, and the sense of other histories (Scott, Amundsen, Shackleton, etc) makes this an informative as well as a gripping tale of polar exploration.