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The Man Who Ate His Boots: The Tragic History Of The Search For The Northwest Passage (2010)

by Anthony Brandt(Favorite Author)

3.76 of 5 Votes: 4

ISBN

0307263924 (ISBN13: 9780307263926)

languge

English

genre

History & Biography

publisher

Knopf

review 1: I never thought I'd be interested in reading narrative history, or actually enjoy it, but this book defied both those assumptions. I picked this book up in Iqaluit after a 6 week field season working on Southampton Island, NU. After reading thrilling tales of steam-ship expeditions being stuck in ice for up to a year at a time, captains watching helplessly as their crew perished from scurvy and despondency, I gained a powerful appreciation of how easy it now is to travel and survive in the Arctic. Anthony Brandt truly has a gift of prose, weaving authentic journal entries into narrative, invoking empathy from the reader for explorers long dead. I would recommend this book to anyone interested in exploration, geography, mapping and adventure.
review 2: A brillia... morent retelling of the history of Arctic exploration that culminated in the search for Sir John Franklin. It's a long, dense read but gripping throughout. Brandt brings alive the stories of the many explorers who suffered through long winters frozen into the ice living in conditions it hardly seems possible humans could survive. He also illuminates the pigheaded stubborn bureaucrat's whose refusal to open their minds to the fact dooms hundreds of men to an unpleasant death or to permanent mutilation from frostbite. By the end of the book the wastefulness of this kind of exploring, the falsity of the glory earned by such explorers, and the toll taken by English exceptionism becomes clear. Their belief in their superiority to the "savages" who lived in the arctic kept them from learning the survival skills that might have made their task easier. But Brandt also makes it clear what a worthless task it was. Men died to draw lines on a map of a region that was mostly uninhabitable and to find a "nortwest passage" that early on in the 1800s it was already clear would have no practical use. But even so they continued on, vainglorious, creating hero after hero who retired to England to take their knighthoods (and decorate the maps with the names of the superiors who had used their influence to promote their naval careers), while the unsung seamen who did most of the gruelling labor on these expeditions suffered, died, and if they survived returned home most likely as beggars since there was no such thing as a pension for common seamen. less

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