Shipwrecks, amputations and polar-bear attacks: the doomed voyage of the Karluk
From our US edition
The heroic age of polar exploration gave birth to epics as grand and as harsh as the landscapes in which they unfolded. And, as in all the best epics, their protagonists are often of interest not only for what they do, but also for who they are, or, in the case of the Arctic adventurer — “explorer” is too confining a word — Vilhjalmur Stefansson (1879-1962), who they pretend to be. Stefansson is the “villain” of Buddy Levy’s Empire of Ice and Stone: The Disastrous and Heroic Voyage of the Karluk, a tale that reads like an unusually grim, remarkably gripping Edwardian imperial yarn.
