Icebound, Andrea Pitzer
Icebound, Andrea Pitzer
5 Rating(s)
List: $25.99 | Sale: $18.20
Club: $12.99

Icebound
Shipwrecked at the Edge of the World

Author: Andrea Pitzer

Narrator: Fred Sanders

Unabridged: 9 hr 18 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 01/12/2021


Synopsis

In the bestselling tradition of Hampton Sides’s In the Kingdom of Ice, a “gripping adventure tale” (The Boston Globe) recounting Dutch polar explorer William Barents’ three harrowing Arctic expeditions—the last of which resulted in a relentlessly challenging year-long fight for survival.

The human story has always been one of perseverance—often against remarkable odds. The most astonishing survival tale of all might be that of 16th-century Dutch explorer William Barents and his crew of sixteen, who ventured farther north than any Europeans before and, on their third polar exploration, lost their ship off the frozen coast of Nova Zembla to unforgiving ice. The men would spend the next year fighting off ravenous polar bears, gnawing hunger, and endless winter.

In Icebound, Andrea Pitzer masterfully combines a gripping tale of survival with a sweeping history of the great Age of Exploration—a time of hope, adventure, and seemingly unlimited geographic frontiers. At the story’s center is William Barents, one of the 16th century’s greatest navigators whose larger-than-life ambitions and obsessive quest to chart a path through the deepest, most remote regions of the Arctic ended in both tragedy and glory. Journalist Pitzer did extensive research, learning how to use four-hundred-year-old navigation equipment, setting out on three Arctic expeditions to retrace Barents’s steps, and visiting replicas of Barents’s ship and cabin.

“A resonant meditation on human ingenuity, resilience, and hope” (The New Yorker), Pitzer’s reenactment of Barents’s ill-fated journey shows us how the human body can function at twenty degrees below, the history of mutiny, the art of celestial navigation, and the intricacies of building shelters. But above all, it gives us a firsthand glimpse into the true nature of courage.

About Andrea Pitzer

Andrea Pitzer is a journalist whose writing has appeared in The Washington Post, The New York Review of Books, Outside, The Daily Beast, Vox, and Slate, among other publications. She has authored two previous books, One Long Night and The Secret History of Vladimir Nabokov—both critically acclaimed. She received an undergraduate degree from Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service in 1994, and later studied at MIT and Harvard as an affiliate of the Nieman Foundation for Journalism. She grew up in West Virginia and currently lives with her family near Washington, DC. Icebound is her most recent work.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Mark on January 25, 2021

I've read quite a few arctic explorer works lately. Most manage to evoke a sense of the emotions behind the events, the desire to find a new route to the riches of the East, to make a name for oneself, the fear and suffering of being trapped in ice for a year or more, the suffering of slow death by......more

Goodreads review by Brittany on November 16, 2022

There's a LOT of bears in this book. And a ton of stubborn men. I feel like I could def leave the review at that, haha. Author Andrea Pitzer has done a TON of research to bring Arctic Voyage adventures to this book. I bet the research was fascinating. However, I do think that some of the chapters cou......more


Quotes

"Narrator Fred Sanders's grave voice and understated performance work well for this grim and brutal history of Arctic exploration. In the sixteenth century, Dutch explorer William Barents set out three times from Amsterdam to search for a northeastern passage through the Arctic to China. Everyone made it home the first time. The second time, Barents lost crew members to polar bear attacks, drowning, and a mutiny. The third expedition was a disaster, with the ship lost and the crew forced to overwinter in the Arctic. Sanders's narration is quiet and grim, a style that makes the grisly polar bear attacks easier to handle."