It’s not so often that you come across a book that genuinely deserves to be described as a ripping yarn. This is one, about an American expedition that aimed at being first to the North Pole. I found the whole story engrossing and well told. I had never heard of this voyage before and I was intrigued by the weird and wonderful geographic theories that were current in the late nineteenth century and by what the explorers hoped, consequently, to find. I love a book that tells me things I hadn’t previously known.
