In the Kingdom of Ice. (History). Hampton Sides

 

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.

Night, Sleep, Death, the Stars (Novel). Joyce Carol Oates

I really  like  the novels of Joyce Carol Oates. I admire her ability to expose the tensions within a group of people who think of themselves as a community, whether they are members of a family, residents of a town, citizens of a nation or, as in this case, all three.

At one level the story is simple. The paterfamilias of a prosperous,  middle class family, acting on a decent impulse,  intervenes in a situation on which he has stumbled. A spiral of conflict ensues: brother against sister, children against mother, conventional family against the civic order.

This is one of those novels where you find yourself having one-sided conversations with the characters:  "Oh for Christ's sake!  Don't do that!  Can't you see where it will lead?"  In that sense, as in many others, it is a faithful portrait of the contemporary United States.