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.

Comments

Murder in Passy, An Aimée Leduc Investigation / Cara Black

If you like your mysteries set in European locales, here’s a Parisian detective series that is sure to please. Aimée Leduc is a private eye, born of a French career detective and an absentee American mother (brief hints of angst over this in this installment). She’s appeared in about ten adventures, always set in iconic Parisian neighborhoods : Murder in the Marais, Murder in the Bastille, Murder in Montmartre, and Murder in the Latin Quarter , to name a few. In Murder in Passy (Paris’s tony XVIe arrondissement), Aimée finds herself mixed up in a murderous intrigue involving the French arm of the Basque nationalist movement. The final chase involves the kidnapping of a Spanish princess, a secret torture chamber used by the Gestapo in WWII, and a rooftop escape. The author sprinkles enough French words into the dialogue to either annoy you or make you feel your French 101 was not for nothing— Zut alors! très chic, c’est parfait, désolé, c’est tout! Oh, and Aimée’s frequent stop...

The Silent Patient / Alex Michaelides

A woman viciously murders her seemingly doting husband. We meet up with her several years later in a mental facility, where a therapist tries to get her to speak and to reveal her story. Who is innocent and who is the victim? The answer isn’t straightforward. The resolution to the novel features a real twist that will have the reader questioning the chronology of the different narrative threads in the book. A real page-turner.

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

Peachy Reads

Search This Blog