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Friday, December 22, 2017

In The Kingdom of Ice: The Grand and Terrible Polar Voyage of the USS Jeannette by Hampton Sides, 454 pages

  For the record, I never ever ever ever want to explore the Arctic . . . ever.
  This is quite the story . . . and true stuff . . .  fact-is-more-amazing-than-fiction kind of true stuff . . . based on ship records and extensive research. I feel as though I must have been walking around with my ears closed to have lived in the U.S. my entire life without having heard about this arctic voyage aiming for the North Pole made on behalf of our country beginning in 1879 before now. Just wow . . . I’m awed by what the men on the USS Jeannette experienced in the name of exploration. If this were fiction, I would have said that some of the story line was a bit too much to accept as possible.
  To be honest, I don’t think I would have made it through this book if I hadn’t listened to it in my car as an audiobook. Even as a listener, I wasn’t sure I was going to have enough patience to wait for the promised journey to begin. If I remember correctly, the story of exploration itself didn’t start until sometime during the fourth out of 14 CDs. I kept listening, though, because I learned something new and interesting every five or ten minutes or so, and I decided that, alone, was worth the experience, even if the promised adventure was never addressed, which, it ultimately was, in wonderful detail.
  Now that I (and my husband) have reached the end of the USS Jeannette’s story, I highly recommend it . . . but not if you prefer generalization over specifics.

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