Ken Coates

For more than 150 years, explorers, ­scientists, archeologists and maritime scholars searched for the lost ships from Sir John Franklin’s last expedition. It was an exploration conundrum of the highest order, played out on the vast, icy and forbidding landscapes of the Arctic Islands in the Canadian North. Few outsiders ventured into this cold expanse, leaving the land and the sea ice for the Inuit who had inhabited the area for…

Here is a book that boldly goes where almost everyone seems to be going these days, to the Canadian Arctic. In years past, northerners used to complain about the neglect of Canada’s Far North, the lack of political attention to the region and the stunning hypocrisy of a people blessed with vast northern expanses and a rich cultural fascination with the North that nonetheless huddles as close to the Canada–United States border as they could possibly…