About this item
A spellbinding biography of Fridtjof Nansen, the pioneer of polar exploration, with a spotlight on his harrowing three-year journey to the top of the world.An explorer who many adventurers argue ranks alongside polar celebrity Ernest Shackleton, Fridtjof Nansen contributed tremendous amounts of new information to our knowledge about the Polar Arctic. At a time when the North Pole was still undiscovered territory, he attempted the journey in a way that most experts thought was mad: Nansen purposefully locked his ship in ice for two years in order to float northward along the currents. Richly illustrated with historic photographs, this riveting account of Nansen's Arctic expedition celebrates the legacy of an extraordinary adventurer who pushed the boundaries of human exploration to further science into the twentieth century.
About the Author
Peter Lourie was born in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and grew up in Connecticut; Ontario, Canada; and New York City. He holds a BA in classics from New York University, an MA in English Literature from the University of Maine, and an MFA in nonfiction creative writing from Columbia University. He has taught writing for many years (Middlebury College, Columbia College, University of Vermont) , and now makes his living traveling, writing and photographing. He also visits schools to share his adventures with students and teachers. He traveled on a Canadian Coast Guard icebreaker in the Beaufort Sea where he recorded multimedia stories for a digital project funded by the National Science Foundation. His newest book for Henry Holt, Jack London and the Klondike Gold Rush, was published in March, 2017. And he is at work on a second adventure biography, about Norwegian polar explorer Fridtjof Nansen.
