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Polaris: The Chief Scientist's Recollections of the American North Pole Expedition, 1871-73 Translated and Edited by William Barr U. Calgary Press $44.95 (ebook free) Reviewed by Russell A. Potter Since it's already been the subject of quite a number of books -- Chauncey Loomis's Weird and Tragic Shores , not to mention dueling exposés by Bruce Henderson ( Fatal North ) and Richard Parry ( Trial by Ice ), one might be forgiven for thinking that there's not much new to be learned about the ill-fated Polaris expedition to the North Pole commanded by Charles Francis Hall in 1871. One would be wrong, of course. The expedition's doctor, Emil Bessels, published his own account of the voyage in Germany in 1879 under the title  Die Amerikanische Nordpol-Expedition , but until now, there has been no English translation of his memoir. Thankfully, William Barr has undertaken this invaluable project, as he did earlier with Heinrich Klutschak's account of the Schwatka expedi

At the End of the World: A True Story of Murder in the Arctic By Lawrence Millman St. Martin's Press, 2017 Reviewed by Russell A. Potter The Arctic has been the theme of many a book – tales of  lost explorers, stories of oddball nothern "characters," and ecological parables of that bellwether northern zone. And yet some, though true in every particular to that portion of the earth which is their theme, have had a deep and profound resonance throughout a far wider swathe of our human experience. Barry Lopez's Arctic Dreams , and John McPhee's Coming Into the Country come to mind. Lawrence Millman's At the End of the World is one of these. Millman's central story – that of a fit of religiously-inflected madness in which a number of Inuit on the remote Belcher Islands in Hudson Bay set upon their neighbors, whom they regarded as incarnations of  "Satan" –  is the main, but in a sense only partial theme of this book. Our solid-seeming world may en