Summary and Reviews of The Ghosts of Cape Sabine by Leonard Guttridge

Media Reviews

Salon.com Guttridge's account - vivid in its whiteness and raw in its themes - is a thriller.

The Atlantic Monthly Mr. Guttridge's pursuit of records, letters, and diaries has enabled him to reconstruct the whole story, and it is as fascinating and exciting story as any adventure novel.

The Washington Post 'Ghosts of Cape Sabine,' which moves with the pace and texture of a finely tuned novel, deserves to become a classic in the literature of exploration. Reading it, you can practically feel the chill, hear the ice floes grinding against one another in the long winter night.

Booklist Guttridge narrates fluidly and pointedly and will easily net aficionados of adventure and disaster tales.

Publishers Weekly Guttridge delves too deeply into the details of bureaucratic infighting and provisioning and fails to successfully evoke the rigors and beauties of the Arctic climate. He relies heavily on the words that the officers and men wrote in their journals, which give readers a sense of the inexorable breakdown of discipline and morale in the face of poor leadership, but don't offer any lingering sense of the men who wrote them or of the conditions to which they ultimately succumbed.