About this item
National Outdoor Book Award-winning author Buddy Levy's thrilling narrative of polar exploration via airship -- and the men who sacrificed everything to make history.. Arctic explorer and American visionary Walter Wellman pioneered both polar and trans-Atlantic airship aviation, making history's first attempts at each. Wellman has been cast as a self-promoting egomaniac known mostly for his catastrophic failures. Instead he was a courageous innovator who pushed the boundaries of polar exploration and paved the way for the ultimate conquest of the North Pole - which would be achieved not by dogsled or airplane, but by airship.. American explorer Dr. Frederick Cook was the first to claim he made it to the North Pole in 1908. A year later, so did American Robert Peary, but both Cook's and Peary's claims had been seriously questioned.
About the Author
Buddy Levy is the author of seven books and his work has been featured or reviewed in The New York Times, NPR, The Wall Street Journal, USA Today, The Washington Post, The Washington Times, Kirkus Book Reviews, Publisher's Weekly, Booklist, The Daily Beast, The A.V. Club and Library Journal. He was the co-star, for 25 episodes from 2010-2012, on HISTORY Channel's hit docuseries Brad Meltzer's DECODED, which aired to an average of 1.7 million weekly viewers and is still airing as reruns today. In 2018 he was an on-camera expert on the 4-part TV Series THE FRONTIERSMEN: The Men Who Built America (HISTORY, Executive Producer Leonardo Di Caprio) . Levy was a contributing writer on the 2018 documentary film The Weight of Water. The film was based in part on the book No Barriers, which Levy co-authored with blind adventurer Erik Weihenmayer. The film premiered at the 2018 Banff Mountain Book and Film Festival, where it won the Grand Prize and the Best Mountain Film Award. It has since won The People's Choice Award for Best Documentary at the 2018 Denver Film Festival; Best Sport and Adventure Film at the 2018 Mendi Bilbao Film Festival; and Audience Choice Award at the 2019 Waimea Ocean Film Festival. Levy's most recent book is Labyrinth of Ice: The Triumphant and Tragic Greely Polar Expedition (St. Martins Press, 2019) . Levy is the author of the National Bestseller No Barriers: A Blind Man's Journey to Kayak the Grand Canyon (with Erik Weihenmayer; Thomas Dunne Books, 2017) ; GERONIMO: The Life and Times of An American Warrior (co-authored with Coach Mike Leach, Simon & Schuster, 2014) and River of Darkness: Francisco Orellana's Legendary Voyage of Death and Discovery Down the Amazon (Bantam Dell, 2011) . His other books include the critically acclaimed and Amazon #1 Bestseller Conquistador: Hernan Cortes, King Montezuma, and the Last Stand of the Aztecs (Bantam Dell, 2008) , which he is currently developing for a television series; American Legend: The Real-Life Adventures of David Crockett (Putnam, 2005, Berkley Books, 2006) ; and Echoes On Rimrock: In Pursuit of the Chukar Partridge (Pruett, 1998) . His books have been published in seven languages. As a freelance journalist he has covered adventure sports and lifestyle/travel subjects around the world, including working with TV impresario Mark Burnett on numerous Eco-Challenges, and other adventure expeditions in Argentina, Borneo, Europe, Greenland, Morocco, and the Philippines. His interests are wide-ranging: discovery and adventure, the mountain men, arctic exploration travail, clashes of empires and civilizations, conspiracy theories, and riveting human stories of survival.