Review by Steve (Retired Bookseller) Buddy Levy's “Empire of Ice and Stone,” a gripping account of the last famous great disaster during the age of Arctic exploration.
Levy relies heavily on the writings of survivors to frame a story that includes all the elements of a classic polar expedition gone wrong: starvation, frostbite, amputations, conflicts, miserable deaths, a heroic trek for help, narrow escapes, a possible murder (it's never been proven), and a lot more.
Nearly everything that had ever gone wrong on arctic journeys struck the crew and passengers of the Karluk, and Levy brings readers right into the thick of it.
Levy evokes these events with clarity and immediacy making it hard to put down. Quoting extensively from journals, and filling in the gaps with lively writing, he captures the destitution, uncertainty, and fear that overtook the castaways during their island ordeal.
I thoroughly enjoyed the book and highly recommend it.
The true, harrowing story of the ill-fated 1913 Canadian Arctic Expedition and the two men who came to define it.
In the summer of 1913, the wooden-hulled brigantine Karluk departed Canada for the Arctic Ocean. At the helm was Captain Bob Bartlett, considered the world's greatest living ice navigator. The expedition's visionary leader was a flamboyant impresario named Vilhjalmur Stefansson hungry for fame. Just six weeks after the Karluk departed, giant ice floes closed in around her. As the ship became icebound, Stefansson disembarked with five companions and struck out on what he claimed was a 10-day caribou hunting trip. Most on board would never see him again. Twenty-two men and an Inuit woman with two small daughters now stood on a mile-square ice floe, their ship and their original leader gone. Under Bartlett's leadership they built make-shift shelters, surviving the freezing darkness of Polar night. Captain Bartlett now made a difficult and courageous decision. He would take one of the young Inuit hunters and attempt a 1000-mile journey to save the shipwrecked survivors. It was their only hope.
Set against the backdrop of the Titanic disaster and World War I, filled with heroism, tragedy, and scientific discovery, Buddy Levy's Empire of Ice and Stone tells the story of two men and two distinctively different brands of leadership-one selfless, one self-serving-and how they would forever be bound by one of the most audacious and disastrous expeditions in polar history, considered the last great voyage of the Heroic Age of Discovery.
Travel and holiday
Paperback
Buddy Levy
448 pages
H: 208mm W: 135mm Spine: 32mm
Weight: 424 grams