Realm of Ice and Sky: Triumph, Tragedy, and History’s Greatest Arctic Rescue
Buddy Levy’s previous retellings of history’s “big adventures” provide a strong foundation for the way he evokes personalities, ambitions, pain, despair, and a slow increment of hard-won successes in Realm of Ice and Sky. His premise is that the Polar airship age—from 1906 to 1928—was an age of heroes. But his definition of a hero is a relatively new one for our age: not a person who dashes out with sword and shield (or six-gun and stallion), but a leader who draws others into risking everything for the sake of a globally significant goal.
The book’s division into three narratives is a wise structure that lets Levy focus on human longings while also recounting the advances in technology that inspired explorers to go beyond just “reaching the Pole,” rather than painting the more common vision of mankind’s insight and inventions inspiring on-the-ground achievement. Part One focuses on airship pioneer Walter Wellman and his repeated efforts to rebuild and fly north; Part Two offers Norway’s noted explorer Roald Amundsen; and Part Three, in heart-aching detail, brings to life the men who challenged themselves to fly north in the dirigible called the Italia, crashed, and then required massive international collaboration for rescue of their scattered survivors.
Frostbite, starvation, loss of limbs—those are all part of their terrible journeys, but Levy focuses insightfully on the men’s loyalties, passions, confusions, and grief. Although few women enter his retelling, those present are shown for their support of the heroic (if costly) goals of the men here, a historic condition of these early-1900s journeys of human exploration that Levy chooses to embrace.
