From Ferdinand Magellan and Sir Francis Drake to lesser-known scientific explorers and even an unknown mariner, a batch of new nonfiction works share previously overlooked stories set during the age of discovery. These titles expand our thinking about the people and missions that jumpstarted maritime travel and commerce.
Latitude: The True Story of the World’s First Scientific Expedition
Nicholas Crane, Oct 2021, Pegasus Books, an imprint of Simon & Schuster
Themes: World history, Maritime history, Expeditions, Age of Discovery

LATITUDE is a fast-paced nonfiction narrative tracing the adventures of a dozen eighteenth-century European scientists who made important discoveries about global navigation and other amazing achievements.
Take-aways: STEM educators will find this true story of scientific discovery to be an engaging way to teach youth about perseverance and the quest for knowledge. ( )

"Latitude: The Astonishing Adventure That Shaped the World" by Nicholas Crane is a well-researched account of an expedition that calculated whether or not the Earth is spherical or oblong.

The book tried, but failed, to show the European adventurers who traveled to South America as comically inept. The failure was due to the fact that the scientists were given little exposition and few character traits, thereby causing tremendous confusion when their names were brought up again and again. The excitement of the book came from the conflicts between these scientists, all of whom we are told have giant egos. Their egotism is only shown in their professional conflicts.

Throughout the book, the adventuring scientists faced the natural dilemmas of any explorer - mosquitos, unbearable cold, unbearable heat - that occasionally sidetrack them, but nothing that is near fatal enough to possibly doom the expedition.

"Latitude" ended up being a bore for me because I found the events circular and the biographies of the characters one-dimensional. I was hoping for something more disastrous or incompetent, but it seemed to be just a regular expedition with a few conflicts of little significance. ( )