The Ice Balloon: S.A. Andrée and the Heroic Age of Arctic Exploration by Alec Wilkinson

With economy and polish, Wilkinson tells how on July 11, 1897, Andrée and two compatriots set off for the North Pole in a 1.5-ton, 97-foot-tall hydrogen-filled balloon.

(Knopf, $26)

“For the 19th-century explorer, romantic notions often trumped sanity,” said Stephen J. Lyons in the Minneapolis Star Tribune. Of the 1,000 men who attempted to reach the North Pole before 1900, none succeeded, and 751 lost their lives. Among them, notes Alec Wilkinson in this “bone-chilling” new book, was a 42-year-old Swedish dreamer and futurist named S.A. Andrée. Even among the ranks of eccentric adventurers, Andrée stood out. A tall, large-nosed man with a post in the Swedish patent office and a deep interest in geomagnetism, Andrée observed that most attempts to reach the pole failed because ships were wrecked on ice floes. It would be better to travel, he surmised, in a balloon.

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