By Airship to the North Pole: An Archaeology of Human Exploration

by P. J. Capelotti

Release Date: September, 1999

Edition: Hardcover

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A disappointing book

I have always been interested in polar exploration. I enjoyed "Andree's Story" and looked forward to this book. But I found the author's pretentious and unscientific style (every third word is I, and he goes on ad nauseam about his archaeologocial expertise and the fact that he visited Danes Island) quite distracting.
Still, if you are interested in the topic and if you want to learn more about Walter Wellman's expeditions, this book may be for you.

Dry and pretentious.......

For years I have been a fan of books on the history of polar exploration and mountaineering. I was really looking forward to digging into the stories behind these attempts to use airships to attain the north pole, and what interesting facts we might learn from the sites themselves....However I was very disappointed in the final result. The historical summary was adequate, however the later portion of the book was pretentious, drawn out, and extremwly dry reading. One would expect that archeology would be employed to answer some "big questions" or resolve some major controversy. Wrong! Instead we learn about the quality of the iron filings used to generate the gas for the balloons, that the car body had more wood in it than expected, and that there was not much on the site to suggest that advertizing was the real reason behind the later expeditions. Yawn! Unless you have some personal stake in the topic (like you visited the site explored by the author) I'd pass this one by...