Face to Face: Polar Portraits

Polar explorer, historian, professor, and writer Huw Lewis-Jones is so prolific you will be forgiven for thinking there are two of him. In 2010, he published this book, an admiring sweep of ocean pioneers, along with a similar, companion book of mountain folks called Mountain Heros: Portraits of Adventure. Face to Face honors modern water people like surfer Kelly Slater and swimmer Lynne Cox while also plucking historical badasses from obscurity, like beloved Sir Thomas Lipton, who lost the America’s Cup five times. 500 words or so of each person’s biography are interspersed with intimate and action-oriented portraits, and Lewis-Jones’s British perspective brings a much more worldly array of personalities than you’d get from an American author. Flip through or plunging dive—either way, you’ll come away longing for the briny deep.