About this item
The human story has always been one of perseverance - often against remarkable odds. The most astonishing survival tale of all might be that of 16th-century Dutch explorer William Barents and his crew of sixteen, who ventured farther north than any Europeans before and, on their third polar exploration, lost their ship off the frozen coast of Nova Zembla to unforgiving ice. The men would spend the next year fighting off ravenous polar bears, gnawing hunger, and endless winter. In Icebound, Andrea Pitzer masterfully combines a gripping tale of survival with a sweeping history of the great Age of Exploration - a time of hope, adventure, and seemingly unlimited geographic frontiers. At the story's center is William Barents, one of the 16th century's greatest navigators whose larger-than-life ambitions and obsessive quest to chart a path through the deepest, most remote regions of the Arctic ended in both tragedy and glory.
About the Author
Andrea Pitzer is the author of ICEBOUND: SHIPWRECKED AT THE EDGE OF THE WORLD, the story of William Barents' three voyages to the Arctic in the 1590s. Published by Scribner in January 2021, ICEBOUND was featured in the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal and received a starred review from Booklist. Her second book, ONE LONG NIGHT: A GLOBAL HISTORY OF CONCENTRATION CAMPS (Little, Brown, 2017) , covers the wrenching story of mass civilian detention from the 1890s to the present. It received a starred review from Kirkus and was named a top history book of the year by Smithsonian Magazine. Her first book, THE SECRET HISTORY OF VLADIMIR NABOKOV (Pegasus, 2013) , received starred reviews from Kirkus, Booklist, and Library Journal. Andrea's writing has appeared many places in print and online, from the Washington Post, the New York Review of Books, Outside, the Daily Beast, GQ, Vox, Slate, and USA Today to Longreads, Lapham's Quarterly, and McSweeney's. She founded Nieman Storyboard, the narrative nonfiction site of the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University.Find her on Twitter at @andreapitzer, like her Facebook page at https://www.facebook.com/andreapitzerauthor/, and visit her website at http://www.andreapitzer.com.
