(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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Wilkinson doesn’t pretend to know precisely how the explorers died, said Sara Wheeler in The New York Times. Thirty-three years after their disappearance, the bear-eaten remains of the men were found on an island 300 miles from the pole, along with photographs and unfinished diaries that recounted the crew’s travails through early autumn. Wilkinson “writes with insight and flair,” artfully weaving a history of Arctic exploration into his central tale. His “prose style suits the spare polar landscape.” Better yet, he understands that the value of polar stories lies not in lists of equipment or provisions but “in our endless love of discovery and the drama of being human.”