In the Kingdom of Ice: The Grand and Terrible Polar Voyage of the USS Jeanette / Hampton Sides

My wife has a passion for polar adventures, which is odd considering she absolutely hates being cold. Or, maybe that’s why it makes it so compelling for her—it’s like her own personal horror literature. Anyway, we both heard the author of In the Kingdom of Ice speak last week, and not being a fan of icy journeys myself, I was nevertheless eager to read this book.

The story of the USS Jeannette is history, not fiction, and although the expedition was celebrated when it occurred during America’s Gilded Age at the end of the 1800s, there are few people in 2015 who know anything about it.

At the time the crew set out on its course past the Bering Strait little was known about what lay at the northernmost extreme of the globe—it was either the stuff of fiction—Santa Claus’s abode was placed there in the 1800s, for example, or of scientific conjecture—some speculated that an ice-free sea stretched across the North Pole. The US was beginning to test global ambitions, and the Navy underwrote this exploratory journey as a means of demonstrating the might of an emerging world power.

The Jeannette very soon became stuck fast in the frozen sea (not so very unlike Shackleton at the opposite end of the globe many years later). The ship was icebound for nearly two years until eventually the men abandoned it after the forces of the surrounding ice crushed it. The details of the survival of the crew, their scientific work, discoveries of strange and interesting islands in the ice sea, and eventual landing on the remotest Siberian coast, all make for a fascinating read.

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Here we are / Graham Swift

This short novel offers a nostalgic look at England in the 1940s and 1950s. Evie, having just lost her husband after a long marriage, looks back at the fateful summer when they met up at the pleasure palace at the end of the Brighton pier. Evie was meant to marry someone else, Ronnie Doane, aka “The Great Pablo,” a magician whose talents really pull in the crowds in the days before television kept people in their front rooms (and to whom she serves as the feather-plumed magician’s assistant). The novel tells of Ronnie’s back story as a London child war evacuee, whose second family in Oxford is so nurturing and loving that he is conflicted about going back to his real home when the war is over. But Evie marries Jack instead and is ghosted (quite literally) by Ronnie even in her final years of life. A wonderful story about people and relationships.

Addie Pray / Joe David Brown (more recently published as Paper Moon ) Click here to check for availability at AFPLS This 1971 novel was the inspiration for the Peter Bogdanovich movie Paper Moon . Eleven-year-old Addie and her maybe-father “Long Boy” Moses Pray crisscross the Deep South “ramifying” (scamming) people during the Great Depression. Addie’s street smarts and perceived girlish innocence, along with Long Boy’s cleverness and shrewd business acumen build their operation until they are dealing in millions. The movie remained pretty true to the first half of the book (though it moved the location from Alabama to Kansas), but the adventures continue far beyond where the movie left off. The decades haven’t dimmed the magic of this rollicking adventure, either in the film or the book. ©Ken Vesey, 17 June 2010

The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie / Alan Bradley

Pippi Longstocking meets Miss Marple in the character of precocious 11-year-old Flavia de Luce, the youngest of three daughters in a once well-to-do family in early 1950s rural England. This first mystery in an intended series finds Flavia beating the local police inspector at his own game in solving the mystery surrounding the murder of an old school mate of her father's in their back garden (in the cucumber patch no less). Clues include a bird indigenous to Norway, a rare stamp, and a bit of flaky pie crust. This nostalgic and innocent whodunnit will have you at the edge of your seat by its suspenseful climax. I can see BBC/PBS picking up on the popularity of this charming mystery. The second in the series has already been published and the third is soon to follow. And by the way, here's a great library quote from Flavia on page 50: "... it occurred to me that Heaven must be a place where the library is open twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. No

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