Nonfiction Audiobook: Labyrinth of Ice

 I used the hardback cover image because the Goodreads image for the audiobook was really lousy!

Title: Labyrinth of Ice: The Triumphant and Tragic Greely Polar Expedition

Author: Buddy Levy. Read by Will Damron

Publication Info: Audible Audio 2019, 13 1/4 hours. Hardback St. Martin's Press, 2019. 400 pages. 

Source: Library digital resources

Blurb (Goodreads): 

In July 1881, Lt. A.W. Greely and his crew of 24 scientists and explorers were bound for the last region unmarked on global maps. Their goal: Farthest North. What would follow was one of the most extraordinary and terrible voyages ever made.

Greely and his men confronted every possible challenge—vicious wolves, sub-zero temperatures, and months of total darkness—as they set about exploring one of the most remote, unrelenting environments on the planet. In May 1882, they broke the 300-year-old record, and returned to camp to eagerly await the resupply ship scheduled to return at the end of the year. Only nothing came.

250 miles south, a wall of ice prevented any rescue from reaching them. Provisions thinned and a second winter descended. Back home, Greely's wife worked tirelessly against government resistance to rally a rescue mission.

Months passed, and Greely made a drastic choice: he and his men loaded the remaining provisions and tools onto their five small boats, and pushed off into the treacherous waters. After just two weeks, dangerous floes surrounded them. Now new dangers awaited: insanity, threats of mutiny, and cannibalism. As food dwindled and the men weakened, Greely's expedition clung desperately to life.

Labyrinth of Ice tells the true story of the heroic lives and deaths of these voyagers hell-bent on fame and fortune—at any cost—and how their journey changed the world. 

My Review:

A worthy addition to my growing pile of books on polar explorations and way-out-there travel/survival! I don't think I even knew about this expedition, though as a key US exploration and one that seems to have given a push to understanding the arctic, I probably should have.

When reading about 19th-Century exploration I am often intrigued and maybe a bit put off by the mix between desire for scientific knowledge and the desire for some kind of glory that has nothing to do with science or knoweldge. This expedition was no exception. The drive to gain "furthest north" seems to have been mostly about national pride, and yet all those efforts to reach the North Pole also served a genuine purpose: debunking the idea of the "warm polar sea" and learning the real nature of the Earth's poles.

 

Greely's party collected vast amounts of data on weather, geology, geography, and more, and perhaps the most amazing part of this amazing survival tale is that the data survived, including the extensive diaries kept by most of the men as part of their duties (i.e, they were always meant to be part of the data, not private diaries, though many seem to have written pretty private stuff). Their records provide a baseline for some of our current studies of how climate change is affecting the arctic.

Initially I wanted more analysis of what went wrong, and whether Greely should have stayed put at their more secure camp instead of taking to the boats and moving south. But I think the author's dismissal is correct: for Greely, a military man from his mid-teens, not to follow orders (even his own) would be unthinkable. They followed the plan. In the end, whose fault it was is less important than the information they brought back. 

 

I do wonder if anyone has studied what made some of the men give up or even go mad while others were able to remain strong, even as their bodies gave up (I think there was a suggestion that some studies have been made). The author raises and then essentially ignores the questions of whether cannibalism occurred, which I also think is the right choice. The accusations tarnished the survivors' homecoming, but ultimately it doesn't matter, unless perhaps for those psychological studies!

 

Damron's excellent reading definitely adds to the feelings of growing tension and "you are there" immediacy.

My Recommendation:

Anyone who has an interest in the history of arctic exploration and scientific discovery should read this. If you just like tales of endurance and rising to meet challenges, that will do too. Warning: there are some grim parts and graphic descriptions of the results of starvation and freezing.

FTC Disclosure: I checked Labyrinth of Ice out of my library, and received nothing from the writer or publisher for my honest review.  The opinions expressed are my own and those of no one else.  I am disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission's 16 CFR, Part 255: "Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising." 

Book Review: Alone on the Ice

Title: Alone on the Ice: The Greatest Survival Story in the History of Exploration
Author: David Roberts
Publication info: 2013 WW Norton.  Blackstone Audio 2013  (Interesting note: this book was published as both ebook and audio book several weeks before the hardback, if pub dates on Goodreads are to be believed).
Source:  Library audio e-book

Summary: 
This is the story of the 1912-13 (1914 by the time they finished, in fact) Australasian Antarctic Expedition, which in fact took place at the same time as Amundsen and Scott were racing for the South Pole.   Though the ad copy and title focus on the amazing journey made by expedition leader Douglas Mawson over several hundred miles alone after his two companions die, it is in fact the story of the entire expedition, and, by extension, the "golden years" of Antarctic exploration.

Review:
First, to get my kvetches out of the way: this book takes on too much.  There is too much backstory (as we fiction types say), and far too much of the book goes into too much detail about other expeditions.  Some of this is necessary--showing how Mawson got where he did, as leader of the AAE, through other expeditions.  The narrative arc (again, thinking like a fiction writer) runs too far on both sides of the advertised purpose of the book.  The book is much stronger when seen as the story of the AAE, rather than being judged as an adventure tale about that one survival situation.  I'm not downplaying that story--it truly is a mind-boggling feat of endurance and strength of body and will, probably never matched.  But the whole expedition is the focus of the book and is a tale worth the telling as well.

I found the initial chapters slow going as we waded through biographies and accounts of other expeditions.  This was made the harder because I was listening to the book, and that made it tough to keep track of who was who and why (I also missed some good pictures that way--original photos by Frank Hurley, expedition photographer, who was also the photographer on the famous Shackleton expedition--in itself an argument for hunting up the hardback).

But I'm a sucker for this kind of thing--both the survival story and the accounts of explorations such as the AAE.  So I hung on, and the book became gripping.  I did feel that Roberts was at times working too hard to make us recognize Mawson's greatness (due to his historic neglect, being overshadowed by Scott and Shackleton who were British rather than Aussie, and had better publicists), but overall it is a well-written account of an expedition of which I had heard very little, though both in terms of personal adventures and scientific value, it may have been one of the best from those early years (Mawson was a scientist first and foremost, unlike most such explorers.  It didn't always make him popular with his men, but it did lead to some excellent data, which he spent his life working to publish and make useful to science).

Recommendation:  As the saying goes (Yogi Berra?  Why not?), if this is the sort of thing you like, you'll like this.  I recommend it for people like me who like tales of exploration, especially from the years before modern equipment and communications took some of the edge off.

#

Full Disclosure: I borrowed Alone on the Ice from my (digital)  library, and received nothing from the writer or publisher in exchange for my honest review.  The opinions expressed are my own and those of no one else.  I am disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission's 16 CFR, Part 255: "Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising."

 

#####

 

And while we're on the subject of ice and freezing and all--don't forget to click through and enter the Death By Ice Cream giveaway!