Customer Reviews

Ninety Degrees North: The Quest for the North Pole

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Simply one of the best books on the quest for the North Pole. Fleming has done it again. Following success with `Barrows Boys' and `Killing Dragons' Fleming has written the epic compilation of the quest for the North Pole. Although `Arctic Grail did a good job on this subject it had one mighty failing, it concluded with Peary's march to the Pole. Mr. Fleming uses new evidence to show that Pearys and Cooks march to the pole were both illusions and probably outright frauds. Simple analysis of their log books makes this clear. Fleming goes on to write about the many airborne attempts at the pole and the actual successful walking attempt in 1968. Simply the most up to date and wonderful book on the Pole attempts, it covers everything from Franklins doomed expedition for the passage to the Jeannete, Nansans Farthest North and Mr. Peary's illusion. A must read for arctic enthusiasts, extreme adventure readers and anyone interested in diverse topics.

Seth J. Frantzman

I have read Mr. Fleming's other two published works and enjoyed them, so I was looking forward to this new book, since I have always had a fascination with explorations both to the North and South Poles. Happily, this book lived up to my high expectations, and reading it was very interesting and enlightening. Some of the stories in this book I had known from reading other works, but the author presented them very well, so I was not bored with going over something I knew. He has a light touch and it makes the reading go well and the pages turn fairly swiftly. He covers the Peary-Cook controversy quite well, without a lot of nonessential detail, and concludes (rightly, as I feel) that neither man actually made it to the Pole. This is a good book to read before a roaring fire during a snowstorm in winter, and then the reader should go outside for a few minutes into a howling wind and feel, if only for a few frozen seconds, what these hardy men must have endured for months on end. Their accomplishments must astonish us, in a much more sedentary age, and this book helps us to acknowledge their tremendous achievements.

Another winner by Fergus Fleming. This work traces the exploration of the arctic during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. While no one expedition is examined in detail, Fleming does a great job of presenting a survey of the numerous efforts to explore the arctic or, more correctly, to reach the north pole.

With seriousness, wit, and sometimes sarcasm, Fleming not only traces the geographical wanderings and experiences of the various expeditions, he also presents the motivations and schemes behind the expeditions. Fleming is not afraid to expose fools or to reveal dishonesty where it appears. He is also not afraid to acknowledge courage and ambition.

A wonderful read that I highly recommend.

British author Fergus Fleming follows up his extroadinarily entertaining "Barrow's Boys" (about the early 19th century golden age of British exploration) with "Ninety Degrees North," another fascinating portrayal of men driven to go where no one had previously gone before. The narrative of Fleming's book covers the quest to stand literally on top of the world that began in earnest in the wake of the disappearance of British explorer Sir John Franklin while searching for the fabled Northwest Passage in 1845.

Fleming reconts each expedition individually and chronologically, retelling the compelling horrors that befell men such as the hapless George DeLong and Charles Francis Hall. He describes in vivid detail what it was like to exist in a climate where the temperatures sometimes reached 100 degrees below zero. Men watched helplessly as their ships became trapped and slowly crushed by the polar ice pack and faced sledging journeys of hundred of miles with little food or shelter.

Fleming recounts the numerous mistakes that were made both theoretical (the persistant belief that the pole was covered by open water) and pratical (the fact that scurvey continued to haunt the explorers even after they figured out how to stop it).
Slowly but surely, as each expedition added to knowledge about the perils of Arctic travel and technology slowly improved, men penetrated farther north until finally Robert Edwin Peary claimed the ultimate prize in 1909.

Fleming is a gifted writer and storyteller and his book makes for terrific reading in front of a fireplace with a mug of hot chocolate on a cold winter night.

I enjoyed this book. The author writes in a popular vein about the explorers in the late 1800's and early 1900's who tried to be the first to the North Pole. Well written. The reader really gets a sense of what it must have been like to be iced into the ice pack, be cold all the time, hunt polar bears, develop scurvy, etc. in the quest for the Pole. The author does a nice job writing about the various players and expeditions. At one point I was sufficiently moved to look up North Pole expeditions on the web with an eye towards gong there. I got over that, but I enjoyed the book till the end.

Fleming has made this territory (arctic exploration) his own. He writes fluently, shrewdly and often wittily. While he celebrates the heroism of these men, he is not afraid to view their motivations with a jaundiced eye and delights in the politics and controversies as much as in the gripping stories of the harrowing treks that mostly stopped short of the North Pole.
He is wonderful on the characters and personalites of the many larger than life characters that made the effort and is especially good in his portrayal of the titanic Peary.
This is the third book of Fleming's I have devoured ravenously; he is an old fashioned master of narrative story-telling. I am ready to suit up and travel hopefully to whatever destination his next opus takes us. Bravo!
(And note the photo of Dr.Cook--a ringer for Rasputin if I'm not mistaken.)

Author Fergus Fleming studied at Oxford University and was a writer and editor at Time Life Books before he became a free lance writer. Written with a trademark wit, the book draws on logs, journals and letters to give a fascinating account of man's quest for the North Pole. Just as Mars is now-- the North Pole was a mystery for the 19th Century explorer. This book picks up where the Barrow's Boys leaves off. It introduces you to some ice-clumped lunatics and some heros and heroines of the Northern arena. Great reading for the beach in the summertime. A bit academic but that's what is so fascinating because it appears to all be true. Sleighs, balloons, dogs, ships, zepppelins -- the last frontier was open for all to conquer. Some did, most didn't but the quest is what makes it so fascinating. What they ate, how they traveled, how they lived, how they raised the money-- they were the Olympians and astronauts of an age long gone by.

At this time of year, we think of the North Pole as being the home of Santa & Mrs. Claus. Except for Santa and his mythical elves, no one lives right at the North Pole. There's a reason. The North Pole is the northernmost point on any planet. The one we know is located in the middle of the Arctic Ocean which lies in international waters. The Arctic ice cap does not cover a landmass. It is a shifting sheet of sea ice up to ten feet thick that floats above the Arctic Ocean, which is the world's smallest ocean, with an area of 3,662,000 square miles and the maximum depth of 17,880 feet.

Greenland is the world's largest island and is eighty percent ice-capped. It contains the Geomagnetic North Pole. The aurora borealis, the Northern Lights, occur here above the magnetic North Pole. The auroras appear as glowing colors in the sky. They are the result of atomic particles from the sun being trapped in the magnetic fields of the Earth's poles.

Most of the Arctic's ice is frozen sea ice, but some glacial (freshwater) ice can be found. The great ice sheets, called glaciers formed over centuries from snowfall that didn't melt. Icebergs are chunks that break off from the glaciers and float out to sea. Sea ice is known as pack ice which drifts on the surface of the sea. A single piece is called a floe. Pack ice forms in winter when temperatures drop to 29 degreesF; fresh water ice forms at 32 degrees F. On Mt. Kilimanjaro, in Tanzania, eighty percent of its glacier mass has melted away. Since 1979, due to global warming, more than twenty percent of the polar ice cap has melted away. The Arctic ice pack becomes as large as the United States during the winter but half of that melts in the summer season. The ice thickness has also been on the decline. Early warning systems for all types of environmental change, especially climate change, are showing damage to the Malaspina Glacier in Alaska.

The Arctic is called the land of the midnight sun, because at the North Pole full sunlight stays all day long throughout the summer. Darkness takes over with the winter solstice when the sun does not shine at all. That's why all exploration has to take place during the summer solstice. Robert E. Peary of the United States was the first person to reach the North Pole, using dogsleds on April 6, 1909. Richard Byrd and Floyd Bennett were the first to land by airplane on May 9, 1926.

As Mr. Fleming points out in this book, there are really five North Poles. "True North" is the one people are most familiar with, called the Geographic North Pole. This is where all the Earth's lines of longitude meet. Latitude 90 degree North means here you can only travel south. The North Magnetic Pole is about six hundred miles from the terrestrial pole and made up of deposits of naturally occurring magnetic material and is the place to which compass needles point. Far from being stationary, this pole shifts several miles each year (closer to North America) because of underground molten metals and to charged particles spewed out from the sun. It is currently located Northwest of Canada's Sverdrup Island.

The North Pole of Balance is found at the center of the Chandler Circle and has been moving toward North America about six inches annually. This point locates the Geographic North Pole. Then, there is the Instantaneous North Pole which moves clockwise around an irregular path called the Chandler Circle. The Geomagnetic North Pole is located near Etah, Greenland. The other Pole is in Antarctica and called the South Pole. This is where the penguins are found. If you saw the movie, 'The March of the Penguins,' you know how bitterly cold the storms can be with violent winds. Polar bears live in the North Pole, as do the reindeer (Rudolph, Santa's reindeer was a special one). Just a little historical background for the doppler radar reports of Santa's progress on Christmas Eve night.

Fergus Fleming has written BARROW'S BOYS and OFF THE MAP: TALES OF ENDURANCE AND EXPLORATION.