Stuart Paine was a dog driver, radio operator, and navigator on the 1933 56-man expedition, the bold and complex venture that is now famous for Byrd's dramatic rescue from Bolling Advance Weather Base located 115 miles inland. Paine's diaries represent the only published contemporary account written from the inside of the Second Expedition. They reveal a behind-the-scenes look at the contentiousness surrounding the planned winter rescue of Byrd and offer unprecedented insights into the expedition's internal dynamics. Equally riveting is Paine's breathtaking narrative of the fall and summer field operations as the field parties depended on their own resources in the face of interminable uncertainty and peril. Undertaking the longest and most hazardous sledging journey of the expedition, Paine guided the first American party from the edge of the Ross Sea more than seven hundred miles up the Ross Ice Shelf and the massive Thorne (Scott) Glacier to approach the South Pole. He and two other men skied more than 1400 miles in 88 days to explore and map part of Antarctica for the first time.  (ANT259, $34.95)