In the Land of White Death, by Valerian Albanov (Modern Library, $22). A few months after Robert Scott perished on an Antarctic glacier in 1912 and two years before the ice of the Weddell Sea crushed Ernest Shackleton's Endurance, a Russian navigator named Valerian Albanov set off on an
Arctic adventure that would yield one of the great undiscovered works of exploration literature. The 32-year-old Albanov left Murmansk in August 1912 as part of the 24-man crew of the Russian ship Saint Anna, her captain 29-year-old Georgyi Brusilov. They were bound for Vladivostok; Brusilov hoped to make the second successful
traverse of the Northeast Passage. But in mid-October the Saint Anna froze in the pack ice, drifting north for the next 15 months. In January 1914 Albanov and ten comrades abandoned their captain and began walking south across the ice. Albanov's gripping account of their 90-day march reads like the work of a master
minimalist—he conveys the dull agony of a comrade's demise in a mere three words: "Nilsen is dying." But why haven't we heard of him? His tale originally appeared as an obscure appendix to a 1917 issue of the Russian journal Notes on Hydrography. It appears in English thanks to Outside
contributing editor David Roberts, who discovered a French translation three years ago at Harvard's Widener Library, where the book had never been checked out. In this edition, translated directly from the Russian and with an introduction by Roberts and a preface by Jon Krakauer, the power of Albanov's words upon reaching solid ground remains undiminished:
"From hell," he wrote, "we have arrived in paradise." —Bruce Barcott
Light Action in the Caribbean, by Barry Lopez (Knopf, $22). "I have taken from these trees, from their arrangement over the ground and from my curiosity about them in the different seasons, a peace I cannot readily understand."This is classic Barry Lopez—the personal relationship with landscape, the sprinkling of
spiritual mystery—yet it comes not from an essay but from the short story "Remembering Orchards," in which the narrator reconnects with his late father by learning to appreciate the old man's hazelnut grove. Lopez's distinctive voice moves seamlessly from fact to fiction, and fans of his nature writing will find plenty to savor in this new collection.
"In the Great Bend of the Souris River" tells the story of a man who wanders North Dakota hunting for a place where he belongs. This is not all rivers-and-trees rumination, however. The story "Rubén Mendoza Vega, Suzuki Professor of Early Caribbean History, University of Florida at Gainesville, Offers a History of the United States Based on Personal
Experience" is told in footnotes, David Foster Wallace–style, and the title story, in which a diving adventure goes horribly awry, reveals the soft-spoken Lopez at his least recognizable, deep in dark Deliveranceterritory. —B.B.
The Beast God Forgot to Invent, by Jim Harrison (Atlantic Monthly Press, $24). In this collection of three new novellas, one of Jim Harrison's narrators is a writer himself, albeit of cheap paperback biographies—bioprobes of celebrities like Marilyn Monroe (a big seller) and Linus Pauling (not). Harrison's term is
also a fitting description for his own new fiction, not so much stories as rambling studies packed with familiar Harrisonian elements: strange and bold characters, good eats, and carnal desire. In the title story, a man responds to a coroner's inquest by penning a memoir of the deceased, a man simply known as Joe, who in life had functioned without visual
memory after a head injury. Joe's very least problem was boredom, the narrator writes, because everything he saw he saw for the first time, over and over. This didn't seem to hurt Joe's chances with the ladies, two of whom, to the narrator's great envy, he regularly satisfied in imaginative style. (If a Barry Lopez character were to sight a dead grosbeak,
he'd ruminate on the mysterious cycle of life and death; when Harrison's character spots one, he recalls the first time he got down a girl's pants.) Before mysteriously drowning in Lake Superior, the befuddled Joe had abandoned civilization for a cave in the wilderness and become as much a wildlife nuisance as a rogue bear. But hell, in Harrison's rough and
woolly world, turning into a bear sometimes seems like the only sensible thing to do. —B.B.
Voyage to Mars: NASA's Search for Life Beyond Earth, by Laurence Bergreen (Riverhead Books, $28). This fall, the Red Planet is rising again on big screens near you, and Bergreen, biographer of Louis Armstrong and Al Capone, has got the skinny on NASA's past and future forays to Mars. He traces the spectacular success of
the 1997 Pathfinder project and the equally spectacular failures of several other multimillion-dollar missions, such as the Mars Climate Orbiter (oops, forgot the metric system!) while also investigating the feasibility of sending adventurers far BEO (beyond earth orbit). Like NASA's own geeky hit-and-miss history, the book occasionally bogs down in
byzantine government politics and interminable meetings, but never fear; there are plenty of X-Files–worthy moments. We eavesdrop on the vicious debate over whether some crusty things on a Martian meteorite prove there's biological life Out There, and even ponder the logistics of gravity-free sex—simply docking will
prove difficult—during missions lasting many months. (Such journeys would pose more grave challenges, like cancer caused by cosmic rays.) What we don't know about our ruddy planetary neighbor is even more tantalizing than what we do, so by the end of the book the reader may well concur with that popular NASA lapel pin: MARS OR
BUST. —Caroline Fraser
