Status Updates From To the End of the Earth: Ou...

I honestly don't know if I can bring myself to finish this book. I'm getting so irritated by the narrator, who is just incredibly arrogant and self absorbed. I'm finding the topic interesting but I'm starting to hate Tom Avery as a person and I kind of wish he had gotten a ghostwriter, because he can't write to save his life.

"While some have suggested that Marvin was in fact killed by one of his Inuit dog drivers, most historians seem to agree that it was simply a tragic accident." [citation needed]

I hate this guy. On adding two female dogs to their all-male dog team: "Governments are always extolling the virtues of businesses having a mixed workforce, so I guess one could say we were doing our bit for equal opportunity."

In 1819, William Edward Parry commanded the Hecla, not, as this book would have it, the Helca.

"So accustomed did [the Inuit] become to life in the Arctic that centuries later, Western explorers would eventually learn that the only way to survive in the Far North was to embrace the Inuit way of life..." What the--? First, this sentence makes no sense because, second, the Inuit didn't become "accustomed" to life in the Arctic, they developed skills & technology that allowed them to live in that hostile climate.

Avery says Herbert estimated that Peary missed the Pole by 60 miles, which isn't the number I remember, but I can't find that section in Herbert's book and Avery's book doesn't have any sources listed. Clever.

It's like this was written by a bullshitting 6th grader the night before their book report was due: "Like Peary, I've always been a dreamer, with an insatiable desire to do something different with my life. Ever since my childhood, Dad has always told me to 'Carpe diem,' literally 'Seize the day,' with the result that I have always had a single-minded determination to fulfill my destiny, whatever it might be."

This guy's coming off as a priviledged dickbag: "Convincing an organization to pay for me and my friends to go gallivanting off to some far-flung corner of the globe was an exhausting, demoralizing, and hapless task."