Author Description

In 1897, at the height of the heroic age of Arctic exploration, the visionary Swedish explorer S. A. Andree made a revolutionary attempt to discover the North Pole by flying over it in a hydrogen balloon. Thirty-three years later, his expedition diaries and papers would be discovered on the ice. Alec Wilkinson uses the explorer`s papers and contemporary sources to tell the full story of this ambitious voyage, while also showing how the late 19th century`s spirit of exploration and scientific discovery drove over 1,000 explorers to the unforgiving Arctic landscape. Suspenseful and haunting, Wilkinson captures Andree`s remarkable adventure and illuminates the detail, beauty, and devastating conditions of traveling and dwelling on the ice