The Explorers Club

September 11, 2023
Journalist Wilser (Alexander Hamilton’s Guide to Life) embarks on a spirited tour of adventures undertaken by members of the Explorers Club, a group founded in 1904 to “push the boundaries of human knowledge.” After its explorers became the first to “conquer” the North Pole, the South Pole, and the moon (Neil Armstrong was a member), it seemed to some as if there was nothing left to explore. Instead of becoming a “dead profession,” however, exploration in the latter part of the 20th century transformed, according to Wilser, from a heedless “drive to conquer” to “an eagerness to collaborate” with local peoples, perform research, and conserve resources and species. He catalogues these shifts through accounts of Adolphus Greeley’s doomed 1881–1884 Arctic voyage, which left 19 men dead; Don Walsh and Jacques Piccard’s 1960 expedition to the Mariana Trench at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean; Callie Broaddus’s 2021 discovery of illegal strip mining in the Ecuadorian rainforest; and astronaut Ed Lu’s forays into space and efforts to map the trajectory of asteroids “large enough to annihilate human civilization.” Readers will be invigorated by these tales of against-the-odds grit and determination (from scaling a frigid Mt. Everest to sending rovers to document Mars’s terrain), which are accompanied by striking full-color photos, ship logs, and maps. Armchair adventurers, take note.