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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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.

Here we are / Graham Swift

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Transient Desires / Donna Leon

Book 30 of the Guido Brunetti mystery series. I haven’t read them all, but enough to enjoy a visit back with a familiar character in a setting I love. Two female American college students are left wounded and unconscious outside the hospital emergency room in the middle of the night. Brunetti soon discovers who left them there, but the question remains why? The plot involves a nephew indebted to his criminal and abusive uncle, and illegal human trafficking. The book ends rather abruptly, and you may get the sense that after twenty-nine installments of the series, the author might just be phoning it in. Nevertheless, this book represented a nice little trip back to a Venice where real people live and work, and this to me is never a waste of time. I downloaded this to my iPad.

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