Readalikes: If you enjoyed July's selection . . .

If you enjoyed In the Kingdom of Ice by Hampton Sides, then you might also like these books suggested by our discussion group members: The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History by Elizabeth Kolbert; Into Thin Air by Jon Krakauer; Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption by Laura Hillenbrand; and Deep Survival: Who Lives, Who Dies, and Why by Laurence Gonzales.

July Not Fiction Book Discussions

In the Kingdom of Ice: The Grand and Terrible Polar Voyage of the USS Jeannette by Hampton Sides is another thrilling story of men and boats, this one a cool read set in Arctic ice for one of Charleston's warmest months.

Our central protagonist, Navy lieutenant George Washington De Long, captain of the Jeannette, warned, "Wintering in the pack may be a thrilling thing to read about alongside a warm fire, but the actual thing is sufficient to make any man prematurely old." In July 1879, De Long and his crew of 32 men set sail from San Francisco on the USS Jeannette in search of a passage to the North Pole. Their voyage was funded and promoted by New York Herald publisher and eccentric Gilded Age baron James Gordon Bennett, Jr., and based, disastrously, upon incorrect speculation that at the North Pole was an open, warm water sea. Just two months into the journey, the ship was trapped in pack ice, where it drifted for two years. Then, just hours after breaking free of the ice, it sank, leaving the crew nearly 1,000 miles from the nearest land, the Arctic coast of Siberia. Three boats set out to reach land . . . To say more about what happened would spoil a long, hot summer day's read.

Sides notes that Bennett and De Long were well-matched "co-conspirators in a quest." Bennett was "a brilliant publisher with electric sensibilities and a profound intuition for what moved and mesmerized the American public" and had "a bottomless appetite for a story that could usher in the modern world." He understood the fascination that the North Pole held for the world in the late 1800s as one of the last unexplored, unconquered places on earth and that "the fur-cloaked men who ventured into the Arctic had become national idols--the aviators, the astronauts, the knights-errant of their day. . . . their quest informed by a kind of dark romance and a desperate chivalry." De Long had grown up an over-protected and bookish boy reading and dreaming of naval adventure. He would become the hero of Bennett's tale. He was "a determined, straight-ahead sort of man, efficient and thorough, and he burned with ambition." His motto was "Do it now." Bennett and De Long each saw the potential for himself in the story of this expedition.

What, in your opinion, is the legacy of "the grand and terrible polar voyage of the USS Jeannette"? Did it contribute to the scientific understanding of Arctic, or was it merely a publicity stunt pulled off at great cost to the men who suffered through it? Why are we, as readers, hungry for stories of adventure in unexplored places, of striving and suffering? And what do you make of the great irony that, as Sides notes, by 2050 climate change, one of the stories most resisted and denied by the general public in the last few decades, will have rendered the North Pole an Open Polar Sea during much of the year after all?

We hope you will join us: Tuesday, July 7, at 6:30 p.m. at Main Library; Thursday, July 23, at 11:00 a.m. at West Ashley Branch Library; and here on the blog.