Women of Discovery: A Celebration of Intrepid Women Who Explored the World

About this book

Across the centuries and from many lands women have set forth on journeys of exploration. Visionaries adventurers artists and scientists these women challenged the limitations both physical and social of their times and in the face of formidable challenges expanded the worlds body of knowledge. Yet despite their extraordinary achievements they have remained unknown and unsung for too long. No longer. The stories of more than eighty extraordinary explorers and adventurers are vividly recounted and stunningly illustrated in Women of Discovery. Here for the first time are gathered the tales of early voyagers such as the valiant tenth-century Viking adventurer Unn the Deep Minded and seventeenth-century Spanish conquistadora Catalina de Erauso. Intrepid explorers like Mary Kingsley in Africa Alexandra David-Neel in Tibet and Freya Stark in the Middle East traveled fearlessly into the blank spaces on the map. Artist explorers including the great botanical painter Anna Maria Sibylla Merian in Surinam writer Zora Neale Hurston in Haiti and photographer Ruth Robertson in South America captured in their art the beauty and mystery of exotic lands. Many brave women have ventured into extreme environments to bring back knowledge whether they were aviators like Amelia Earhart mountaineers like Annie Smith Peck or Arctic explorers like Irina and Valentina Kuznetsova. And the annals of science would be far poorer without the work of such women as primatologists Jane Goodall and Dian Fossey ethnobotanist Nicole Maxwell and ichthyologist Eugenie Clark. This is truly a gathering of heroines full of tales of courage talent intelligence and sheer determination. With a foreword by renowned journalist Christiane Amanpour Women of Discovery is a remarkable book an achievement in its own right and certain to thrill anyone captivated by the world-changing drama of exploration.