In the Kingdom of Ice: The Grand and Terrible Polar Voyage of the USS Jeannette

"This book is a surprising mix of great scholarship and great storytelling. Hampton Sides is well known as a writer about nature and the outdoors. He was able to put together, through an amazing use of source material, this incredible story of the efforts to discover the North Pole. In many ways, this was similar, in the 1870s and 1880s, to the efforts in the 1960s of going to the moon. The North Pole was one of those unknown areas that was fascinating to the scientific community and also became a goal of national aspiration. Which country could be the first to reach the North Pole? The United States, which had just come out of the Civil War and was achieving recognition for its technology and its scientific progress, took on the challenge of assembling an expedition. It was financed privately by James Gordon Bennett, Jr., who was the publisher of the New York Herald. He joined with the US Navy to commission this voyage by the USS Jeannette in 1879 to find a route that would take them to the North Pole. It’s a story of exploration, of survival and death, and it has many amazing characters. It’s an amazing story but a tragic one: only 13 out of the 33 men who were on the voyage survived. If you had to draw a line between all these books, it could be the notion of the frontier. Whether it’s the frontier of technology, in the case of Brooklyn Bridge, or the frontier of discovering the North Pole, or the frontier of freedom and the intellectual boundaries that are explored by Eric Foner. And then, perhaps, the final frontier—of death—which is reflected in Drew Gilpin Faust’s book. There’s the combination of the emotional and the intellectual in the realisation of the impact of death. There’s also the exploration of the human experience that these books represent. Perhaps exploration of new frontiers is the best way to describe the commonality of these books."