A sixty-year saga of frostbite and fake news that follows the no-holds-barred battle between two legendary explorers to reach the North Pole, and the newspapers which stopped at nothing to get-and sell-the story.
Exciting and impressively researched ... Hartman’s book conjures an age when newspapers went to the earth’s far edges in search of stories that evoked deep longings of the soul. The pursuit of those stories brought great risk and sometimes great disgrace.
Hartman...has combined the saga of the jostling press lords with the narrative of the sometimes-deadly competition ... Can be a challenge for the reader, who may well get snowbound in a blizzard of mounting detail. Still, like reaching the pole itself, the journey is rewarding as Mr. Hartman adroitly re-animates a colorful and courageous era in American history.
A tale of polar adventure and newspaper warfare that will interest readers of Hampton Sides and Gay Talese alike ... Diligently researched and crafted in prose that rarely turns purple, Battle of Ink and Ice reads more like a literary history than a suspenseful page-turner. It covers a wide berth ... His structural choices sometimes warrant a scratch of the head. Short chapters keep the story moving, but 52 is perhaps too many. Some chapters seem as if they end before they even lift off, pulling you out of a particular arc right as you’re being drawn in.
