"Alexander Graham Bell resisted, but his family held firm - he would inherit the leadership of the recently established National Geographic Society. He came to relish his role as its guiding force, and over the next century he and his descendants built the Society into one of the most iconic organizations in the world, its yellow-bordered magazine as recognizable as the Nike swoosh of the Coca-Cola script. Explorers House is the first authoritative critical history of the National Geographic Society and its founding family, the Grosvenors, a media dynasty to rival the Sulzburgers, the Luces, or the Grahams." "Drawing on unprecedented access to personal correspondence and to the magazine's archives, Robert M. Poole brings the tale of the family and the National Geographic to life. Here readers find the inside stories behind the groundbreaking discoveries that helped shape our view of the world, from Robert Peary's controversial North Pole claim to Jacques Cousteau's famous Calypso voyages, from Louis and Mary Leakey's research on human origins to Jane Goodall's studies of chimpanzees, from the first American ascent of Mount Everest to the dive that unearthed the remains of the HMS Bounty off Pitcairn Island."--BOOK JACKET.