Chronicles of arctic exploration have always interested me and when I saw this title featured in a Barnes and Noble newsletter a couple of months ago I immediately knew I'd read it. I won't pretend I wasn't swayed by the gorgeous cover art.

Having never heard of S.A Andrée I didn't know what to expect. He and his fellow adventures where the first to attempt a polar approach by balloon: a feat met with more than a bit of skepticism in the late 19th century. That skepticism, it turns out, was well founded. I'm not giving anything away when I say that theirs was a tragic journey.

Throughout, Wilkinson - a longtime New Yorker contributed - did much to situate the journey historically within the context of polar exploration (both northern and southern). Other attempts by traditional means were presented alongside Andrée's novel approach and did much to inform the narrative in the technology and science employed as well as the levels of physical depravation that explorers endured. For instance, it was a widely help opinion that a temperate sea surrounded the pole. We now know this to be false.

While it was an enjoyable and edifying read, I found it ultimately to be unsatisfying. Andrée's expedition was the focus, but I felt we never got a full picture of his journey. Part of the problem was the super short chapters. That format prevented Wilkinson from really delving into the heart of the matter in the way that a book like Sebastian Junger's The Perfect Storm does so well. The later chapters give a pretty good play-by-play of Andrée's sally, but it felt a bit too removed for my taste. Maybe it's my schadenfreude at it's worse, but I wanted to feel myself trapped on the northern ice floes, hubris exacting it's toll. Overall, I would definitely recommend this book for someone who's interested in the, admittedly narrow, intersection of Victorian polar adventuring and ballooning if for no other reason than the photographs. The cover is just one of many haunting images presented here.