The Ice Balloon: S. A. Andree and the Heroic Age of Arctic Exploration (Vintage)

Amazon Best Books of the Month, January 2012: Before the twentieth century, more than a thousand people tried to reach the (north) pole,” Alec Wilkinson writes in his entertaining new book. Most of those attempts were by ship, sled, and foot. The odds of reaching the pole alive were terrible. About three-fourths of those explorers died. But that one-in-four chance of success didn’t deter Swedish explorer S.A. Andree, who in 1897 attempted the most unlikely means of reaching the North Pole: by hydrogen balloon. What makes this more than another adventure story is Wilkinson’s exploration of mankind’s compulsion to reach the extreme points of the Earth, despite all the absurd and obvious risks. --Neal Thompson