True North

This book is about one of the most enduring and vitriolic feuds in the history of exploration. "What a consummate cur he is" said Robert Peary of Frederick Cook in 1911. Cook responded, "Peary has stooped to every crime from rape to murder." They started as friends and shipmates, with Cook, a doctor, accompanying Peary, a civil engineer, on a Greenland expedition in 1891. Peary's leg was shattered in an accident and without Cook's care he might not have walked again. But by the summer of 1909 the goodwill was gone. Peary said he had reached the North Pole in September 1909; Cook presented evidence that he got there in 1908. A century later, the battle still rages. Bruce Henderson makes a wonderful narrative out of the claims and counterclaims, and he introduces fascinating scientific and psychological evidence to put the appalling details of polar travel in a new context.