Alden L. Todd’s Abandoned has been called “A model account of perhaps the most ill-fated and certainly the most grimly fascinating episode in the annals of Arctic exploration....” Working extensively with primary sources—official correspondence, diaries, letters, notes by the expedition’s participants and those left at home and in the nation’s capital—Alden Todd presents an evenhanded, elegantly written account of the greatest tragedy in the history of American arctic exploration: the Greely expedition of 1881-1884. Launched as part of the United States’ participation in the first International Polar Year, the expedition sent twenty-five volunteers to what is now Ellesmere Island in the Canadian High Arctic, off the northwest coast of Greenland, commanded by Adolphus Washington Greely, a thirty-seven-year-old lieutenant in the U.S. Army’s Signal Corps. The ship sent to resupply them in the summer of 1882 was forced to turn back before reaching the station, and the men were left to endure short rations and unbroken isolation at their icy base. When the second relief ship, sent in 1883, was crushed in the ice, Greely led his men south, following a prearranged plan. The crew spent a third and increasingly more wretched winter camped at Cape Sabine. Supplies ran out, the hunting failed, and men began to die of starvation. Abandoned is a gripping account of men battling for survival as they are pitted against the elements and each other. It is also the most complete and authentic account of the controversial Greely Expedition ever published, an exemplar of the best in chronicles of polar exploration.

The gripping tale of the Greenpeace activists who endured a hundred days in a Murmansk isolation jail.

Winner of the National Book Award This bestselling, groundbreaking exploration of the Far North is a classic of natural history, anthropology, and travel writing. The Arctic is a perilous place. Only a few species of wild animals can survive its harsh climate. In this modern classic, Barry Lopez explores the many-faceted wonders of the Far North: its strangely stunted forests, its mesmerizing aurora borealis, its frozen seas. Musk oxen, polar bears, narwhal, and other exotic beasts of the region come alive through Lopez’s passionate and nuanced observations. And, as he examines the history and culture of its indigenous communities, along with parallel narratives of intrepid, often underprepared and subsequently doomed polar explorers, Lopez drives to the heart of why the austere and formidable Arctic is also a constant source of breathtaking beauty, mystery, and wonder. Written in prose as pure as the land it describes, Arctic Dreams is a timeless mediation on the ability of the landscape to shape our dreams and to haunt our imaginations.

The fish-out-of-water stories of Northern Exposure and Doc Martin meet the rough-and-rugged setting of the Discovery Channel’s Alaskan Bush People in Thomas J. Sims’s On Call in the Arctic, where the author relates his incredible experience saving lives in one of the most remote outposts in North America.Imagine a young doctor, trained in the latest medical knowledge and state-of-the-art equipment, suddenly transported back to one of the world’s most isolated and unforgiving environments—Nome, Alaska. Dr. Sims’ plans to become a pediatric surgeon drastically changed when, on the eve of being drafted into the Army to serve as a M.A.S.H. surgeon in Vietnam, he was offered a commission in the U.S. Public Health for assignment in Anchorage, Alaska.In order to do his job, Dr. Sims had to overcome racism, cultural prejudices, and hostility from those who would like to see him sent packing. On Call in the Arctic reveals the thrills and the terrors of frontier medicine, where Dr. Sims must rely upon his instincts, improvise, and persevere against all odds in order to help his patients on the icy shores of the Bering Sea.

Traces the life of Henson, the Black explorer who accompanied the Perry expedition to the North Pole, and explains the reasons for the long delay in his recognition

With his unrivaled photography taken over 20 years of expeditions, including to the North Pole, Copeland transports us to the Arctic to share the heart of the polar cap as never before seen. The Arctic is one of the last true wildernesses on the planet, and its demise should ring the alarm for lower latitudes. Copeland’s multifaceted background—not only a polar explorer, award-winning photographer, and established author and journalist but also a dedicated environmental advocate—offers us a unique vantage point from which to appreciate this lonely spot. Although the vision presented in these pages may be poetic, the book’s aims are pragmatic—to inspire and help foster a transformation toward a sustainable future. The Arctic: A Darker Shade of White is a gateway into Copeland’s intrepid journeys as he takes us along and unveils some regions of the globe that had rarely—if ever—seen a footprint before. It is an intimate and visually arresting ode to the human pursuit of exploration inside Nature’s most remote and otherworldly theater.

Readers of Flying the Alaska Wild marveled at Mort Mason’s true tales of braving the elements at the extremes in a Piper Super Cub. But the bush pilot, adventurer, and raconteur was just beginning, and in this book he revisits his most memorable moments of flying by the seat of his pants through blizzards and white-outs, on assignments at times hazardous and sometimes simply whacky, always with a sense of humor and due respect for the limitless wilds of Alaska beneath his wings. The world of a bush pilot really is the final frontier, and for thirty years Mort Mason was there, clocking enough heart-stopping miles to make most life-stories utterly incredible. In The Alaska Bush Pilot Chronicles Mason recounts more of his unlikely adventures in the face of Alaska’s unforgiving weather and terrain. His stories gives readers the rare chance to experience the disappearing thrills and challenges of meeting the American frontier on its own unyielding terms.