Volume 48, Number 13 · August 9, 2001
Ice Capades
By Al Alvarez
BOOKS DRAWN ON IN THIS REVIEW
Barrow's Boys: A Stirring Story of Daring, Fortitude, and Downright Lunacy
by Fergus Fleming
Grove, 512 pp., $15.00 (paper)
Antarctica: Firsthand Accounts of Exploration and Endurance
edited by Charles Neider
Cooper Square Press, 460 pp., $17.95 (paper)
Let Heroes Speak: Antarctic Explorers
by Michael H. Rosove
Naval Institute Press, 320 pp., $36.95
Ice Bound: A Doctor's Incredible Battle for Survival at the South Pole
by Dr. Jerri Nielsen
Talk Miramax Books, 362 pp., $23.95
The Ice Master: The Doomed 1913 Voyage of the Karluk
by Jennifer Niven
Hyperion, 432 pp., $14.95 (paper)
In the Land of White Death: An Epic Story of Survival in the Siberian Arctic
by Valerian Albanov
Modern Library, 205 pp., $21.95
Great Exploration Hoaxes
by David Roberts
Modern Library, 256 pp., $14.95 (paper)
The Mountains of My Life
by Walter Bonatti
Modern Library, 576 pp., $14.95 (paper)
The glamour of the North Pole was only briefly off when Conrad was writing his story in the 1890s—perhaps because of the ungentlemanly bickering between rival expeditions—and it was on again within a decade. In the opening years of the twentieth century, the great vision of a commercial link between Europe and China through a Northwest Passage had turned out to be a delusion, but the race for the North and South Poles was as much a patriotic obsession as the space race was fifty years later. Now the poles have been crossed, recrossed, mapped in detail, and even partially colonized. Seven different nations maintain research stations around the edge of Antarctica; there is a permanent American base at the South Pole itself, and regular cruise ships take tourists to the tip of the Antarctic Peninsula to admire the penguins. At the opposite end of the world, the Arctic is ringed with Early Warning systems and they are drilling for oil not far from where would-be discoverers of the Northwest Passage perished.
Review, 4276 words
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