Exploring Top Books of Shelfari

The bestselling author of Ilium and Olympos transforms the true story of a legendary Arctic expedition into a thriller worthy of Stephen King or Patrick O'Brian. Their captain's insane vision of a Northwest Passage has kept the crewmen of The Terror trapped in Arctic ice for two years without a thaw. But the real threat to their survival isn't the ever-shifting landscape of white, the provisions... (more)

The Voyage of the Narwhal

by Andrea Barrett

Capturing a crucial moment in the history of exploration, the mid-nineteenth-century romance with the Arctic, Andrea Barrett focuses on a particular expedition and its accompanying scholar-naturalist, Erasmus Darwin Wells. Through his eyes, we meet the Narwhal's crew and its commander--obsessed with the search for an open polar sea--and encounter the far-north culture of the Esquimaux. In counterpoint, we see the... (more)

Ada Blackjack: A True Story of Survival in the Arctic

Ada Blackjack: A True Story of Survival in the Arctic

by Jennifer Niven

Now in paperback, the gripping and inspiring tale of a woman's survival alone in the Arctic. In 1921, four men and one woman ventured deep into the Arctic. Two years later, only one returned. When 23-year-old Inuit Ada Blackjack signed on as a seamstress for a top-secret Arctic expedition, her goal was simple: earn money and find a husband. But her terrifying experiences -- both in the wild and back in... (more)

The Ice Master: The Doomed 1913 Voyage of the Karluk

The Ice Master: The Doomed 1913 Voyage of the Karluk

by Jennifer Niven

The Karluk set out in 1913 in search of an undiscovered continent, with the largest scientific staff ever sent into the Arctic. Soon after, winter had begun, they were blown off course by polar storms, the ship became imprisoned in ice, and the expedition was abandoned by its leader. Hundreds of miles from civilization, the castaways had no choice but to find solid ground as they struggled against starvation, snow... (more)

Terror

by Dan Simmons

The men on board HMS Terror have every expectation of finding the Northwest Passage. When the expedition's leader, Sir John Franklin, meets a terrible death, Captain Francis Crozier takes command and leads his surviving crewmen on a last, desperate attempt to flee south across the ice. But as another winter approaches, as scurvy and starvation grow more terrible, and as the Terror on the ice stalks them southward,... (more)

Buried in Ice (Time Quest Book)

by Shelley Tanaka, Owen Beattie

Luke Smith, a fictional stoker on board one of the ships looking for the fabled Northwest Passage in 1845, tells of the events that befell the two ships, while, 135 years later, an anthropologist unravels the mystery of what happened.

In the Land of White Death

by Valerian Ivanovich Al?banov

In 1912, six months after Robert Falcon Scott and four of his men came to grief in Antarctica, a thirty-two-year-old Russian navigator named Valerian Albanov embarked on an expedition that would prove even more disastrous. In search of new Arctic hunting grounds, Albanov's ship, the Saint Anna, was frozen fast in the pack ice of the treacherous Kara Sea-a misfortune grievously compounded by an incompetent... (more)

The Arctic Grail: The Quest for the Northwest Passage and The North Pole, 1818-1909

The Arctic Grail: The Quest for the Northwest Passage and The North Pole, 1818-1909

by Pierre Berton

Culled from extensive research of handwritten diaries and private journals, Arctic Grail is the definitive book on the age of arctic exploration and adventure. Journey across the ice with a Who's Who of polar explorers, men of every temperament, including the pious and ambitious Edward Perry, the first explorer to probe deep into the Arctic labyrinth; Adolphus Greely, a Civil War veteran who had to watch his... (more)

Ice Blink: The Tragic Fate of Sir John Franklin's Lost Polar Expedition

Ice Blink: The Tragic Fate of Sir John Franklin's Lost Polar Expedition

by Scott Cookman

"Absorbing…artfully narrat<es> a possible course of events in the expedition’s demise, based on the one official note and bits of debris (including evidence of cannibalism) found by searchers sent to look for Franklin in the 1850s. Adventure readers will flock to this fine regaling of the enduring mystery surrounding the best-known disaster in Arctic exploration."--Booklist "A great Victorian adventure... (more)

Unknown Shore: The Lost History of England's Arctic Colony

Unknown Shore: The Lost History of England's Arctic Colony

by Robert Ruby

Here is the true story of how the first European colony in the New World was lost to history, then found again three hundred years later. Englands first attempt at colonizing the New World was not at Roanoke or Jamestown but on a mostly frozen, pocket-sized island in the Canadian Arctic. Queen Elizabeth I called that place Meta Incognitathe Unknown Shore. Backed by Elizabeth I and her key advisors, including the... (more)

Bloody Falls of the Coppermine: Madness and Murder in the Arctic Barren Lands

Bloody Falls of the Coppermine: Madness and Murder in the Arctic Barren Lands

by McKay Jenkins

In the winter of 1913, high in the Canadian Arctic, two Catholic priests set out on a dangerous mission to reach a group of Eskimos and convert them. Upon reaching their destination, the priests were murdered. Over the next three years, one of the Arctic’s most tragic stories became one of North America’s strangest and most memorable police investigations and trials. A near-perfect parable of late colonialism, as... (more)

Ghosts of Cape Sabine: The Harrowing True Story of the Greely Expedition

Ghosts of Cape Sabine: The Harrowing True Story of the Greely Expedition

by Leonard F. Guttridge

The Arctic's most notorious expedition... A true story of mutiny, madness, suicide, and cannibalism. In Icebound , acclaimed historian Leonard F. Guttridge told a "truly exciting" ( Atlantic Monthly ) and "gripping tale" ( Washington Post ) of exploration that was "well worth reading." ( New York Times ) Now, he uncovers a notorious true story of man against nature-and the nature of man-that will chill... (more)

The Ice Museum: In Search of the Lost Land of Thule

The Ice Museum: In Search of the Lost Land of Thule

by Joanna Kavenna

A legend, a land once seen and then lost forever, Thule was a place beyond the edge of the maps, a mystery for thousands of years. And to the Nazis, Thule was an icy Eden, birthplace of Nordic "purity." In this exquisitely written narrative, Joanna Kavenna wanders in search of Thule, to Shetland, Iceland, Norway, Estonia, Greenland, and Svalbard, unearthing the philosophers, poets, and explorers who... (more)

The Frozen Ship: The Histories and Tales of Polar Exploration

The Frozen Ship: The Histories and Tales of Polar Exploration

by Sarah Moss

This thought-provoking examination of the most influential and popular accounts of polar exploration—from Viking settlers and Renaissance conquerors to expeditions led by such famous explorers as Ernest Shackleton, Richard Byrd, and Roald Amundsen—emphasizes themes of endurance, greed, obsession, and self-sacrifice in tales that have captured the popular imagination for centuries. The stories that consider the... (more)

A Woman's Way Through Unknown Labrador

by Mina Hubbard

Friday morning was warm and bright. It seemed wonderful to be having so much fine weather in Labrador, and not a fly or mosquito as yet. The one nuisance we had met was mice or lemmings. They had been busy with my hat in the night, and when I came to put it on that morning I found there was a hole eaten in the crown and a meal or two taken out of the brim. There seemed to be thousands of them, and they ran... (more)

The Search for the North West Passage

by Ann Savours

Charting the Sea of Darkness: The Four Voyages of Henry Hudson

Charting the Sea of Darkness: The Four Voyages of Henry Hudson

by Donald S. Johnson

Using his original logs, brings into focus the seldom discussed Englishman who, under the Dutch flag, explored Delaware Bay, the Hudson River, and Hudson's Bay near the Arctic circle, where in 1610 his crew mutinied and left him for dead.

Farthest North: Endurance and Adventure in the Quest for the North Pole

Farthest North: Endurance and Adventure in the Quest for the North Pole

by Clive Holland

"A few toes aren't much to give to achieve the Pole," observed Robert Peary, but as Clive Holland's gripping history of traveling across the polar ice cap shows, much more was at risk for the men who went as far north as possible. In addition to Peary's crowning triumph at the North Pole, there is the fourteen-year-old Horatio Nelson battling polar bears, the sinking of the Jeannette on De Long's push farthest... (more)

I May Be Some Time: Ice and the English Imagination

I May Be Some Time: Ice and the English Imagination

by Francis Spufford

I May Be Some Time is a thrilling cultural history of the human obsession with polar exploration, the call of vast empty spaces and the seductive beauty of untrodden snow. Francis Spufford takes the reader on a journey to the center of the human imagination, a place that still echoes with the last words of one of Scott's doomed explorers as he stepped from the tent, never to be seen again, "I'm just going outside... (more)

Weird and Tragic Shores: The Story of Charles Francis Hall, Explorer (Modern Library Exploration)

Weird and Tragic Shores: The Story of Charles Francis Hall, Explorer (Modern Library Exploration)

by Chauncey C. Loomis

In 1860, fifteen years after Sir John Franklin's ill-fated expedition disappeared in the Arctic, an obscure Cincinnati businessman named Charles Francis Hall set out to locate and rescue the expedition's survivors. He was an amateur explorer, without any scientific training or experience, but he was driven by a sense of personal destiny and religious and patriotic fervor. Despite the odds against him, he made... (more)

Shelfari Book Activity

Tags: arctic exploration

by Dan Simmons

by Andrea Barrett

by Jennifer Niven

by Jennifer Niven

by Dan Simmons

by Shelley Tanaka, Owen Beattie

by Valerian Ivanovich Al?banov

by Pierre Berton

by Scott Cookman

by Robert Ruby

by McKay Jenkins

by Leonard F. Guttridge

by Joanna Kavenna

by Sarah Moss

by Mina Hubbard

by Ann Savours

by Donald S. Johnson

by Clive Holland

by Francis Spufford

by Chauncey C. Loomis