I'm a little torn on how to rate this. On the one hand, it's a fascinating story, and I am a total sucker for turn-of-the-century polar exploration tales. On the other hand, well...I didn't find this book to be terribly well-written, despite all the prizes Wilkinson seems to have won for various other things. I found the order in which he told the story really awkward, and felt like he spent more time and energy describing other polar expeditions than he did the one the book is actually supposed to be about. There were also a lot of unclear sentences, and sentences that felt like they came straight from a high school research paper--way too many totally unnecessary quotations! Still, I hadn't heard about Andrée until this book came out, and I'm now interested enough that I will probably attempt to find other things that have been written about him and his balloon expedition. A+ for topic, but C for execution.