Credit From Jules Feiffer's "Kill My Mother"
In The New York Times Book Review, Robert R. Harris reviews Hampton Sides’s “In the Kingdom of Ice: The Grand and Terrible Polar Voyage of the USS Jeannette,” about a disastrous expedition to the North Pole, funded by the newspaper owner James Gordon Bennett Jr. and led by a young Navy lieutenant named George Washington De Long. Mr. Harris writes:
“In the Kingdom of Ice” is a harrowing story well told, but it is more than just that. Sides illuminates Gilded Age society, offering droll anecdotes of Bennett’s escapades in New York, Newport and Europe. The author also convincingly portrays what it was like to survive in northern Siberia and provides an engaging account of the voyage of the Corwin, a kind of mail and police steamer that searched for the Jeannette and carried John Muir as a supernumerary. In addition, Sides intersperses moving excerpts from Emma De Long’s increasingly agonized letters, letters her husband would never read.
On this week’s podcast, Mr. Sides discusses “In the Kingdom of Ice”; Beth Macy talks about “Factory Man”; and John Williams has best-seller news. Pamela Paul is the host.