(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.”
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Also of interest...in picture books for grown-upsfeature How About Never—Is Never Good for You?; The Undertaking of Lily Chen; Meanwhile, in San Francisco; The Portlandia Activity Book
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Author of the week: Karen Russell
feature Karen Russell could use a rest.
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The Double Life of Paul de Man by Evelyn Barish
feature Evelyn Barish “has an amazing tale to tell” about the Belgian-born intellectual who enthralled a generation of students and academic colleagues.
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Book of the week: Flash Boys: A Wall Street Revolt by Michael Lewis
feature Michael Lewis's description of how high-frequency traders use lightning-fast computers to their advantage is “guaranteed to make blood boil.”
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Also of interest...in creative rebellion
feature A Man Called Destruction; Rebel Music; American Fun; The Scarlet Sisters
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Author of the week: Susanna Kaysen
feature For a famous memoirist, Susanna Kaysen is highly ambivalent about sharing details about her life.
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You Must Remember This: Life and Style in Hollywood’s Golden Age by Robert Wagner
feature Robert Wagner “seems to have known anybody who was anybody in Hollywood.”
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Book of the week: Astoria: John Jacob Astor and Thomas Jefferson’s Lost Pacific Empire by Peter Stark
feature The tale of Astoria’s rise and fall turns out to be “as exciting as anything in American history.”