Caroline Alexander | |
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Born | March 13, 1956 United States |
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Caroline Alexander is a British author, classicist and filmmaker. She is the author of the best-selling The Endurance , and The Bounty , and other works of literary non-fiction, such as The Way to Xanadu and The War that Killed Achilles. In 2015, she published a new translation of Homer's Iliad . [1]
Alexander is also a writer and producer of documentaries such as The Endurance (based upon her book of the same title) and Tiger Tiger. [2]
Born March 13, 1956, [3] in the United States of British parents, Alexander grew up in North Florida, but travelled widely, living in the West Indies, Italy, England, Ireland, and the Netherlands. She began her classical studies at Florida State University in her senior year of high-school. In 1977, among the first class of female Rhodes Scholars, she attended Somerville College, Oxford, taking her degree in Philosophy and Theology. [4]
Between 1982 and 1985, she established a small department of classics at the University of Malawi, in south-central Africa. Following this, she obtained her doctorate in Classics at Columbia University, as a Mellon Fellow in the Humanities. [5]
Alexander began her career as a freelance writer while in graduate school, and subsequently has published widely on subjects ranging from Antarctic exploration, travels in central Africa, tigers, butterfly poachers, ancient history, lost treasure, Xanadu, and military subjects such as shell shock and blast-induced neurotrauma. She has published two New York Times best-sellers (The Endurance, The Bounty).
Alexander was a Contributing Writer for National Geographic Magazine for many years, and has also written for The New Yorker , Outside and Smithsonian among other publications; her work has appeared in a number of anthologies of literary non-fiction. [6]
Her National Geographic Magazine cover story, “The Invisible War on The Brain,” was praised for exploring the effects of blast-induced trauma on modern soldiers, and nominated for a Kavli Science Journalism Award.
Alexander is a member of the American Philological Association, the Royal Geographical Society, the Explorer's Club, and the Directors Guild of America.
Title | Production company | Credits | Notes |
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Tiger, Tiger | White Mountain Films/Kennedy Marshall production | George Butler producer/director; Caroline Alexander writer/producer | 90 minute theatrical documentary and 40 minute IMAX version, following big-cat conservationist Alan Rabinowitz into one of the last tiger habitats, the mangrove forest of the Indian and Bangladesh Sunderbans |
The Lord God Bird | White Mountain Films Production | George Butler producer/director; Caroline Alexander writer | 90 minute theatrical documentary about the possible re-discovery of the ivory-billed woodpecker |
The Endurance | White Mountain Films Production | George Butler producer/director; Caroline Alexander writer/Executive Producer | 90 minute theatrical documentary about Shackleton's 1914 expedition. Released in 2001; National Board of Review Best Documentary and numerous other awards; two hour television version nominated for a British Academy Award, 2000. |
Shackleton's Antarctic Adventure | White Mountain Films Production | George Butler producer/director; Caroline Alexander writer/consultant |
In the riveting “Skies of Thunder,” Caroline Alexander considers what it took to get supplies to Allied ground troops in China.
Publisher | Year | Title | Subject | Languages | Notes |
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Ecco Press/Vintage Classics | 2015 | The Iliad: A New Translation | Retells the events of the few weeks in the ten-year war between the invading Achaeans, or Greeks, and the Trojans in the city of Ilion. [7] | Translated into English | First English edition of the Iliad that is translated by a woman. [8] |
Random House/National Geographic Society | 2011 | Lost Gold of the Dark Ages: War, Treasure and the Mystery of the Saxons | A history attempting to shed light on one of England's most mysterious periods. | Written in English | The book is introduced by one of the experts (Dr. Kevin Leary) who is studying the 1500 pieces of jewelry. [9] |
Viking/Faber | 2009 | The War that Killed Achilles: The True Story of the Iliad and the Trojan War | An interpretation and study of Homer's Iliad. | Translated into multiple languages | Ken Burns called it "Spectacular and constantly surprising." [10] |
Viking/HarperCollins | 2003 | The Bounty: The True Story of the Mutiny on the Bounty | A historical examination of the story-myth of the mutiny on the Bounty, a small armed transport vessel. | Written in English | A New York Times bestseller. National Book Critics Circle Award finalist. New York Times top nine books of 2003. |
Knopf/Bloomsbury | 1998 | The Endurance: Shackleton's Legendary Antarctic Expedition | Tells the story of the explorer Ernest Shackleton's attempt to be the first to cross Antarctica on foot. | Translated into multiple languages | A New York Times bestseller |
HarperCollins/Bloomsbury | 1997 | Mrs. Chippy's Last Expedition, 1914–1915 | Journal of Shackleton's Polar-going cat | Also published in German and Greek | From the perspective of a cat. [11] |
Knopf | 1995 | Battle's End: A Seminole Football Team Revisited | Tutoring Florida State University football players in English | Written in English | Seems to have only had a printing in 1995. [12] |
Orion 1993/Knopf 1994 | 1993/1994 | The Way to Xanadu | Travels to the landmarks of Coleridge's Kubla Khan | Written in English | A New York Times “Notable Book of the Year.” Also published in paperback by Phoenix, 1994. |
Knopf/Bloomsbury | 1989 | One Dry Season: In the Footsteps of Mary Kingsley in Equatorial Africa | A retracing of Mary Kingsley's travels through of the then French colony Gabon. | Written in English | A Book of the Month Club selection. Published in paperback by Vintage, 1991; and Phoenix, 1993. |
Sir Ernest Henry Shackleton was an Anglo-Irish Antarctic explorer who led three British expeditions to the Antarctic. He was one of the principal figures of the period known as the Heroic Age of Antarctic Exploration.
The voyage of the James Caird was a journey of 1,300 kilometres (800 mi) from Elephant Island in the South Shetland Islands through the Southern Ocean to South Georgia, undertaken by Sir Ernest Shackleton and five companions to obtain rescue for the main body of the stranded Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition of 1914–1917. Many historians regard the voyage of the crew in a 22.5-foot (6.9 m) ship's boat through the "Furious Fifties" as the greatest small-boat journey ever completed.
George Tyssen Butler was a British filmmaker and photographer, and a pioneer of the theatrical documentary. Some of his most popular films include Pumping Iron (1977), which introduced a wider audience to Arnold Schwarzenegger, The Endurance films, retelling Sir Ernest Shackleton's saga of Antarctic survival, and Going Upriver: The Long War of John Kerry (2004), about his friend John Kerry's leadership in the peace movement.
The Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition of 1914–1917 is considered to be the last major expedition of the Heroic Age of Antarctic Exploration. Conceived by Sir Ernest Shackleton, the expedition was an attempt to make the first land crossing of the Antarctic continent. After Roald Amundsen's South Pole expedition in 1911, this crossing remained, in Shackleton's words, the "one great main object of Antarctic journeyings". Shackleton's expedition failed to accomplish this objective but became recognized instead as an epic feat of endurance.
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Frank Arthur Worsley was a New Zealand sailor and explorer who served on Ernest Shackleton's Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition of 1914–1916, as captain of Endurance. He also served in the Royal Navy Reserve during the First World War.
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The Rise of Silas Lapham is a realist novel by William Dean Howells published in 1885. The story follows the materialistic rise of Silas Lapham from rags to riches, and his ensuing moral susceptibility. Silas earns a fortune in the paint business, but he lacks social standards, which he tries to attain through his daughter's marriage into the aristocratic Corey family. Silas' morality does not fail him. He loses his money but makes the right moral decision when his partner proposes the unethical selling of the mills to English settlers.
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Christina Malman was an artist and illustrator, best known for her work for The New Yorker magazine.