Endurance: Shackleton's Incredible Voyage

Editor and author Alfred Lansing is best known for Endurance: Shackleton's Incredible Voyage, a historical account of Sir Ernest Shackleton's 1914 voyage to Antarctica, written for a young adult audience. Using diaries of expedition members and interviews with those still living, Lansing tells the story of the expedition, which met with disaster when their ship, the Endurance, was surrounded and eventually crushed by ice, leaving Shackleton and his crew trapped on the ice floes for five months before they were able to escape to open water in one of the lifeboats. In 1960, Lansing received both the Christopher Award and the Secondary Education Board's Book Award for Endurance: Shackleton's Incredible Voyage. Alfred Lansing was born in Chicago in 1921. He served in the U.S. Navy throughout World War II, receiving the Purple Heart. Upon leaving the Navy in 1946, he returned to school, attending North Park College for two years and then transferring to Northwestern University. He worked as a writer for United Press and for Collier's magazine, as a freelance writer, and later as an editor for Time, Inc. Books. Lansing died in 1975. He and his wife, Barbara, whom he married in 1955, had two children.

James C. Dobson was born in Shreveport, Louisiana on April 21, 1936. He received an undergraduate degree from Pasadena College and a Ph.D. in child development from the University of Southern California. He was an associate clinical professor of pediatrics at the University of Southern California School of Medicine and on the attending staff of Children's Hospital of Los Angeles. He was founder and president of Focus on the Family, an organization that produces nationally broadcast radio programs on domestic issues, but is no longer affiliated with the organization because of significant philosophical differences with the new leadership. He is founder and president of Family Talk, a nonprofit organization that produces his radio program, Dr. James Dobson's Family Talk. He is the author of more than 30 books dedicated to the preservation of the family including The New Dare to Discipline, Love for a Lifetime, When God Doesn't Make Sense, Life on the Edge, Love Must Be Tough, The New Strong-Willed Child, Marriage Under Fire, and Head Over Heels.