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16 of 20 people found the following review helpful:
Resolute, January 1, 2007
Mr. Sandler can write well. The research quality is high. However, the completion of the book and its final editing are of very poor quality.
Several times in the book, very important small segments of the narrative are missing. For example, the book describes how McClure's ship gets frozen hard in the ice in Mercy Bay on Banks Island. It also describes how a sledging expedition from the Resolute gets to Winter Harbor on Mellville Island about 170 miles away and finds a message in a container from McClure. However, the event where McClure sledged from Mercy Harbor to Winter Harbor and back is entirely missing from the narrative. Thus, the narrative makes no sense. This omission is typical in the sloppy finish work of this book. Important earlier events that provide a logical understanding of subsequent events are randomly omitted from time to time.
Additionally, while Sandler puts forth a dozen good maps of the nineteenth century Artic, at least one quarter of the place names used in the narrative are not on any map. As it is unlikely that any reader has a nineteenth century Artic map, this makes the narrative completely unfathomable at times. There was an era when the creation of maps in history books was extremely expensive and horribly time consuming. This era is gone; any quality editor could check and rectify this significant problem with a full hard day's work.
Despite Sandler's good research and clear writing skills, I would not recommend this book. The book "Barrow's Boy's" is clearer and much better organized even though it is missing some excellent research on the personal qualities of the leaders that is found in Sandler's treatment here. However, it appears that this book was finally thrown together to meet a deadline and the final review, finish, and editing are very sloppily executed. This significantly diminishes what should have been a great history and frustrates and distracts readers so that they are quite dissatisfied.
I have not ever written a book review but, after having spent at least eight hours reading this book, I feel it important to report back to the author and editor the effects of their very poor finishing work.
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10 of 12 people found the following review helpful:
Excellent overview of Artic discovery and a mystery ship too, November 27, 2006
What an historic HOOK this book has. In 1854 the HMS RESOLUTE is in the Artic searching for the lost John Franklin expedition. The RESOLUTE's captain gets stuck in the ice and abandon's the ship. A year later an American whaler discovers the RESLOTE drifting and deserted. The United States government reconditions the RESOLUTE and presents it as a gift to the Queen as an act of national friendship. Years later the Queen had the remains of the RESOLUTE carved into an ornate desk as a gift for President Hayes. And today that same desk still sits in the Oval Office. (Remember the famous picture with John John sticking his head out of JFK's desk.) This story alone would make for a great book but in what is a short 248 page narrative Mr. Sandler covers the totality of the British and American expeditions to the Artic as they all are in a rush to discover the Northwest Passage. Each chapter in the book is an example of excellent story telling covering a separate event or adventure. All amazing pieces of the story to building the big picture of what it took to explore and survive in the Artic. This is a fun, all be it light, overview of a topic you may not have given any consideration. I found the book very educational, entertaining, and very well presented. It even has an 18 page Epilogue reviewing what happened to the 36 explorer that make up the various expeditions. I might add here that I would recommend more highly the excellent book, The Ice Master about the doomed 1913 voyage of the karluk. This book really gets into the personal business of survival, luck and a super story. But not doubt about it, Martin Sandler has written a very entertaining page turner although with a more global overview.
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3 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
It makes for a fascinating, involving journey that reads with the drama of fiction but is entirely factual history., March 12, 2007
RESOLUTE: THE EPIC SEARCH FOR THE NORTHWEST PASSAGE AND JOHN FRANKLIN, AND THE DISCOVERY OF THE QUEEN'S GHOST SHIP is true adventure history at its best, and a top pick for any general-interest lending collection. Historian Martin Sandler offers up a high-seas adventure journey set in the early 1800s, following a vanished famous explorer, some 39 attempted rescues, a ghost ship, and many discoveries. It makes for a fascinating, involving journey that reads with the drama of fiction but is entirely factual history.
Diane C. Donovan
California Bookwatch
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4 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
moderate writing, bad research, October 16, 2007
Another Arctic historian wrote a review siting numerous mistakes in the over all Arctic history Mr. Sandler includes in this book. However, he did not know the RESOLUTE story well enough to know if there were similar errors in the 1/3 of the book dedicated to the title ship. After years of researching this story, I am known in the maritime history circles as the world's leading expert on HMS RESOLUTE, and I found 13 mistakes, some very significant, in Mr. Sandler's RESOLUTE story. The cover itself is misleading, as the picture is of another ship! However, to name two: Mr. Sandler made serious mistakes in the service histories of two of the most important players: Belcher and Kellett. The accurate service records are available to anyone who is interested in doing a little research in the Admiralty records in London. He refers to the tensions between America and Britain as being at a low ebb when the 2 countries were on the brink of going to war. To leave an analysis of this relationship out of the book is to miss the significance and importance of the story: RESOLUTE stopped this war from happening. The gift of the desk is the symbol of Anglo-American friendship, much like the Statue of Liberty is for Franco-American friendship. Without this, it is just a story, granted an interesting story, about a salvaged ship, not one that chronicles a history changing moment in the relationship between America and Britain. Lastly, there is no depth to his characters, even though the story provides him with a sadistic commander and an extremely kind captain. I could not recommend this book to anyone.
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The Courage, the Vision, the Horror, January 7, 2009
It is exceptionally rare for a work of non-fiction to transport the reader to a landscape so alien that it defies the imagination, to meet characters whose particular combination of courage, determination, ingenuity, and vision drive them to feats beyond all experience. Resolute is such a story and were it not for Martin Sandler's scholarly writing, his copious end notes, appendices, and biographic epilogue, the reader might be forgiven for thinking it just so much fiction. But the images of skeletons languishing in open boats, of message cairns against bleak snowswept horizons, and the thought of hundreds of men cowering in the cold and dark for month after mind-numbing month awaiting the spring to break up the ice seizing their ships, cannot help but shock the modern reader. Sandler's scholarly history of the search for (and discovery of) the Northwest Passage, and of the search for the men who disappeared there both thrills and haunts us. It is extraordinary how much treasure, planning, and hope went into England's quest for a commercially viable route over the northern boundary of North America, but it is equally remarkable how large a role was played by wanton ignorance. The gentlemen (nearly all were eventually knighted), who took this stage, very rarely consulted the people who knew most about the geography and the terrain, that is, the whalers and the Inuit natives. And the disregard for fundamental science is startling. How could Second Secretary of the Admiralty, John Barrow, whose orders sent so many men into those icy seas, ever have imagined that the ice that blocked the sea at lower latitudes would somehow vanish as the pole was approached? And sending those men out with what amounted to experimental food canning technology amounted to negligent homicide.
Resolute is a book of history, of adventure, of biography, and to be perfectly truthful, it is also a book of horror. Read it for any of these reasons, but be prepared to be shaken up a little in the process.
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Wrong Title, August 20, 2008
Story is interesting, but it is about the quest to find the Northwest Passage. The Resolute had a relatively minor role in this effort. It was lost, was found, was reconditioned, was returned to England, and, finally, decommissioned. The best part of the Resolute's story is the famous Oval Office Desk. The book was difficult to read because Sandler had so many names and characters in the book. This made it very hard to follow. Good read, but slow and tedious to get through. Not one of my favorites.
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