The Shameless Diary of an Explorer (Annotated) Paperback – November 18, 2016

So you've read lots of stories and watched movies and think you'd make a great explorer? Think again. This true tale of an early attempt to not only climb Mount McKinley (Denali), but to just get to it, will leave you exhausted. I fly over this terrain every day in my job as a bush pilot and I can not imagine what these men went through. After reading this book I don't have to imagine it. I can easily say that no one today would willing attempt to do so much with so little as these men did. It's like Shackleton's journey but with swamps and mosquitoes instead of the sea.

This is one of the great real-life adventure stories of early 1900's and perhaps of all times. An adventure written so well you will feel the cold, rain, ice, mosquitos and the despair of horses left behind. The story of the valiant attempt and failure on Mt. McKinley. Also the story of the determination of a small band of explorers, the first to circumnavigate the great mountain.Up there with Into The Silence, Alone on the Ice, Into Thin Air, and the Endurance among others.

This book was written almost a 100 years ago - so it takes a bit to get the pace and grammar - but the story is a good one if you like stories of people trying to do something never done before with lousy equipment and no real maps. The author is blunt about his and his fellow group’s foibles. They were the first non Natives to hike around Denali - they tried to get to the top - but as the sub title notes - it was a failed attempt.

Among adventure narratives this one is exceptional for its literary values. Dunn does not portray himself as anyone except a horse packer. No quasi heroic heroic struggle against mighty odds here. His descriptions of the country he passed through are often quite poetic.

Expected a good read - instead got a cure for insomnia. Not much of interest, with descriptions that could have been written by an informed ten year old.Very disappointing. Affirmed my 30 page rule: Stop reading if not engaged by the first 30 pages, (which I did).

Hard to read but what an adventure!

Robert Dunn was a journalist, born in Rhode Island and educated at Harvard. After gaining some travel experience in Alaska, he accompanied Dr. Frederick Cook on his 1903 expedition to climb Mt. McKinley, now known as Denali, the highest mountain in North America. Dunn chronicled the journey in his 1907 book The Shameless Diary of an Explorer. In his introduction, Dunn states that his intention was to write an honest account of wilderness exploration, one unencumbered by romantic baggage and phony heroism. Perhaps this asserted frankness is what Dunn means by “shameless.” He certainly doesn’t sugar-coat his narrative of the trip. In fact, he has very little good to say about Alaska or his traveling companions.Cook’s team was not the first to attempt to climb McKinley. By 1903, however, no one had yet charted a successful route to the summit. After debarking from a steamer at the coastal village of Tyonek, Dunn and company spend half the book just getting to the base of the mountain, a tedious and arduous journey. Day after lugubrious day Dunn’s diary tells of trudging through muddy tundra and sucking swamps, fording countless streams and rivers—always wet, always filthy, plagued by mosquitos, always irritable. The six men in the company soon grow to dislike one another, or at least Dunn despises the rest, which is all you hear about. Dunn may have accomplished his goal of brutal frankness, but the resulting narrative leaves little for the reader to enjoy. I could have used just a touch of that romantic heroism he worked so hard to eschew.Dunn says he was appointed by Cook as second in command of the expedition. He also served as geologist, but barely mentions geology. Another team member was a botanist, but if there was a scientific purpose to this expedition, it is not revealed by Dunn’s narrative. Climbing the mountain was the primary goal, and mostly what the reader gets is an account of the drudgery and misery involved in working towards that end. The best this book has to offer is a few passages of natural description that somewhat convey the beauty of the Alaskan wilderness. Most of the time, however, Dunn seems more concerned with ostentatious verbage than with educating the reader, so his prose is often annoying and frustratingly difficult to decipher.Cook’s name is never mentioned in the book; he is only referred to as “the professor.” Dunn may have changed the names of the other four members of the expedition as well, in order to give himself free rein to speak poorly of them. The impression one gets, however, is that Dunn is the last person with whom you’d want to climb a mountain. He speaks as if he were a genius with all the answers, while the rest of the group are a bunch of idiots. In doing so, he reveals the ugliness of his own personality. It is often apparent that he would rather complain than contribute. In addition, Dunn makes comments that reveal him to be a racist and an anti-Semite. One of the team members was Jewish, and Dunn never lets you forget it. He has nothing good to say about the guy, and attributes all the man’s faults to his ethnicity. In 1903, it was not uncommon for white writers to extoll the glories of the Anglo-Saxon race while propagating stereotypes of everybody else. Jack London or John Muir may have had the literary talent to partially offset such antiquated bigotry, but Dunn does not. Plenty of explorers and nature writers have penned travelogues of Alaska. Don’t waste your time reading this one.

You can find something better to read than this uninspiring book. The expedition recounted by the author can be divided into three parts: (1) Yelling at the horses carrying the expedition's gear, and getting them unstuck from mud, day after day after day, (2) Climbing attempt of Mt. McKinley, (3) Returning from McKinley to civilization. Part 1, by far the longest, was by far the worst. Spoiler alert: Horses are ill-suited to the tundra. Part 2, the climbing section, could have been good, but there was so much mountaineering jargon -- never explained -- that it was never clear exactly what they were doing. Part 3 was mercifully short and, even so, I skimmed it because I wanted badly for the book to end. The maps were too small to be informative (Modern Library edition) -- it wouldn't have killed the publisher to put a couple more in. As for the claim that this shows the real side of exploring: yeah, ok. It is a tale of going unprepared and under-equipped into an unforgiving environment -- the outcome is pre-ordained. Gets a second star for a few interesting sentences about caribou... but don't expect a naturalist's eye from this writer.