Lewis & Clark and Other Great Adventurers

An entertaining and informative trilogy of 50-minute episodes from the BBC's excellent series Wilderness Men (originally broadcast in 2000), this single-disc compilation combines archival material, expert interviews, well-written narration (spoken by underrated Irish actor John Lynch) and authentic dramatic re-enactments to chronicle the achievements of Lewis & Clark, Ernest Shackleton, and the lesser-known Alexander von Humboldt. In the Lewis & Clark episode (given title billing here, somewhat arbitrarily), informative interviews with authors and historians (including the late Stephen Ambrose) help limn a revealing portrait of the great explorers, touching on their attitude of superiority toward the Native Americans with whom they engaged in fur trading; the devastating obstacles of waterfalls along the Missouri River; the extraordinary coincidence of recruiting the Shoshone Indian Sacagawea as their translator and then later encountering her brother as a Nez Perce tribal leader; and the transformation of their journey from Thomas Jefferson's mandated quest for the mythical Northwest Passage into an extraordinary expedition of biological and botanical discovery. Shackleton's equally astonishing tale of miraculous survival in the Antarctic has been chronicled in several popular books and documentaries over the last decade or so (including an IMAX movie), and this version is similarly engrossing as it relates the unforgettable journey of Ernest Shackleton and his expedition members, who somehow managed to survive against all odds after their ship was immobilized and crushed in the Antarctic ice. In the third and final episode, British actor Christopher Eccleston plays German naturalist and geographer Alexander von Humboldt as he shares insights gleaned from an ambitious late-18th century journey to South America. Humboldt's conviction that nature is based on interactions between the land, plants, and animals, formed the basis of what would eventually be called the ecology movement. Recommended. Aud: H, C, P. (J. Shannon)