- This event has passed.
Andrea Pitzer (Icebound) in Conversation with Julian Sancton Virtual Author Talk and Q&A
01/27/2022 @ 6:00 pm - 7:00 pm
Free
Bank Square Books and Savoy Bookshop & Café present an author talk and Q&A with Andrea Pitzer for the new book, Icebound. Andrea will be in conversation with author Julian Sancton.
This event is free, but registration is required. Registration details are at the bottom of this page.
About the Book
In the bestselling tradition of Hampton Sides’s In the Kingdom of Ice, a “gripping adventure tale” (The Boston Globe) recounting Dutch polar explorer William Barents’ three harrowing Arctic expeditions—the last of which resulted in a relentlessly challenging year-long fight for survival.
The human story has always been one of perseverance—often against remarkable odds. The most astonishing survival tale of all might be that of 16th-century Dutch explorer William Barents and his crew of sixteen, who ventured farther north than any Europeans before and, on their third polar exploration, lost their ship off the frozen coast of Nova Zembla to unforgiving ice. The men would spend the next year fighting off ravenous polar bears, gnawing hunger, and endless winter.
In Icebound, Andrea Pitzer masterfully combines a gripping tale of survival with a sweeping history of the great Age of Exploration—a time of hope, adventure, and seemingly unlimited geographic frontiers. At the story’s center is William Barents, one of the 16th century’s greatest navigators whose larger-than-life ambitions and obsessive quest to chart a path through the deepest, most remote regions of the Arctic ended in both tragedy and glory. Journalist Pitzer did extensive research, learning how to use four-hundred-year-old navigation equipment, setting out on three Arctic expeditions to retrace Barents’s steps, and visiting replicas of Barents’s ship and cabin.
“A resonant meditation on human ingenuity, resilience, and hope” (The New Yorker), Pitzer’s reenactment of Barents’s ill-fated journey shows us how the human body can function at twenty degrees below, the history of mutiny, the art of celestial navigation, and the intricacies of building shelters. But above all, it gives us a firsthand glimpse into the true nature of courage.
About Andrea Pitzer
Andrea Pitzer is the author of ICEBOUND: SHIPWRECKED AT THE EDGE OF THE WORLD, the story of William Barents’ three voyages to the Arctic in the 1590s. Published by Scribner in January 2021, ICEBOUND was featured in the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal and received a starred review from Booklist. Her second book, ONE LONG NIGHT: A GLOBAL HISTORY OF CONCENTRATION CAMPS (Little, Brown, 2017), covers the wrenching story of mass civilian detention from the 1890s to the present. It received a starred review from Kirkus and was named a top history book of the year by Smithsonian Magazine. Her first book, THE SECRET HISTORY OF VLADIMIR NABOKOV (Pegasus, 2013), received starred reviews from Kirkus, Booklist, and Library Journal.
Andrea’s writing has appeared many places in print and online, from the Washington Post, the New York Review of Books, Outside, the Daily Beast, GQ, Vox, Slate, and USA Today to Longreads, Lapham’s Quarterly, and McSweeney’s. She founded Nieman Storyboard, the narrative nonfiction site of the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University.
Find her on Twitter at @andreapitzer, like her Facebook page at https://www.facebook.com/andreapitzerauthor/, and visit her website at http://www.andreapitzer.com.
About Julian Sancton
Julian Sancton has been an editor at Vanity Fair, Esquire, and Departures, and written for such publications as The New Yorker, Wired, and Playboy. He has reported from every continent, including Antarctica, which he first visited while researching his book, Madhouse at the End of the Earth.
