Search results for ""Author Cathryn J. Prince""

Fanny Bullock Workman was a complicated and restless woman who defied the rigid Victorian morals she found as restrictive as a corset. With her frizzy brown hair tucked under a helmet, Workman was a force on and off the mountain. Instrumental in breaking the British stranglehold on Himalayan mountain climbing, this American woman climbed more peaks than any of her peers and became the first woman to map the far reaches of the Himalayas and the second to address the Royal Geographic Society of London, whose past members included Charles Darwin, Richard Francis Burton, and David Livingstone. Her books—replete with photographs, illustrations, and descriptions of meteorological conditions, glaciology, and the effect of high altitudes on humans—remained useful decades after their publication. Paving the way for a legion of female climbers, Workman's legacy lives on in scholarship prizes at Wellesley, Smith, Radcliffe, and Bryn Mawr.Author and journalist Cathryn J. Prince brings Fanny Bullock Workman to life, revealing how she navigated the male-dominated world of alpine clubs and adventure societies as nimbly as she navigated the deep crevasses and icy granite walls of the Himalayas. Queen of the Mountaineers is the story of one woman's role in science and exploration, breaking boundaries and charting frontiers for women everywhere.

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With a polished walking stick and neatly pressed trousers, Richard Halliburton served as an intrepid globetrotting guide for millions of Americans in the 1920s and ’30s. Readers waited with bated breath for each new article and book he wrote. During his career, Halliburton climbed the Matterhorn, nearly fell out of his plane while shooting the first aerial photographs of Mount Everest, and became the first person to swim the full length of the Panama Canal.With his matinee idol looks, the Tennessee native was a media darling in an era of optimism and increased social openness. But as the Great Depression and looming war pushed America toward social conservatism, Halliburton more actively worked to hide his homosexuality, burnishing his image as a masculine trailblazer. No middle ground existed regarding Halliburton—he was either adored or abhorred. Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald called the Princeton graduate a poseur, a symbol of nouveau riche depravity. But most found his daredevil persona irresistible.As chronicled in American Daredevil, Halliburton harnessed the media of his day to gain and maintain a widespread following long before our age of the twenty-four-hour news cycle, and thus became the first adventure journalist. And during the darkest hours of the Great Depression, Halliburton did something remarkable: he inspired generations of authors, journalists, and everyday people who dreamed of fame and glory to explore the world.

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