Wound Up

With hoopla and heroism, Frederick Cook and Robert Peary battled high winds, plunging temperatures, encroaching ice, and each other in their quest to be the first to reach the North Pole. And with hype and headlines, the New York Herald and the New York Times engaged in a parallel battle, to increase their presence and their power in a fiercely competitive Manhattan newspaper environment. None of them emerged unscathed.

The combination of the two clashes — the explorers and the editors — produced one of the great spectacles of the early twentieth ­century. And while the New York newspaper wars have been the subject of scores of books and polar expeditions have inspired writers for generations, Darrell Hartman had the insight to connect them in Battle of Ink and Ice, a lively account of how the papers sometimes went nuts and the explorers sometimes went...