RaveThe New York Times Book ReviewHigginbotham is an intrepid journalist and skillful storyteller who takes care to humanize the dozens of major and minor players involved in NASA’s many successful, and occasionally catastrophic, space missions ... Quick, devastating.
Andrea Pitzer
MixedThe New York Times Book ReviewIcebound...gives readers a helpful accounting of the unique political context in which Barents set sail ... Pitzer writes with care about the Arctic landscape Barents encountered—a dangerous world teeming with life and all that relentless ice, which would interest anyone who’s sailed in bad weather or, say, scraped ice off a windshield in subzero temperatures. But Icebound is curiously dispassionate about its human subjects. Over some 200 pages, events are dutifully logged, hewing closely to de Veer’s account. Yet Pitzer seems reluctant to venture into the minds of the individuals who gambled so much and took such pains to tell their stories. Her book follows \'the men\'—often unnamed and undifferentiated; in doing so, this spare retelling revels in the monotony of 16th-century exploration.
