BYRD A TRIBUTE IN FACT

In 1929, a mechanic who could not swim was thrown through the edge of the Antarctic ice into freezing water. He did not scream. He called out, calmly, that he could not hold on much longer. History forgot his name. This book does not.

Richard Evelyn Byrd flew toward the North Pole, crossed the Atlantic, flew over the South Pole, and spent four and a half months alone in a buried shack at eighty degrees south, slowly poisoned by carbon monoxide. He refused to call for help, so that no one would risk the crevasses to save him. Three men came anyway.

For decades his story has been buried under a fake hollow-earth diary, a mistranslated interview, and secret Nazi bases that never existed. BYRD: A Tribute in Fact strips all of it away. Every claim is traced to its source: Byrd's own books, Navy citations, the Library of Congress and National Archives, seismic papers from the ice itself, and the firsthand account of the survivors of the George One crash on Thurston Island.

What remains is better than any myth: real courage, real science, real flaws, and the men and women who paid the price of every first. Illustrated with more than fifty archival photographs.

Book Four of Z.C. Higgins's series His Story.