Riveting historical fiction based on Vilhjalmur Steffansson's two most disastrous Arctic expeditions, plus a sad sack professor who reads about them, and also gets inappropriate with a student. In the afterword, Healy writes that he's a little hard on Steffanson, but the facts of Steffansson's expeditions to Wrangel island, & his advocacy of the all-meat diet will always make me kind of skeptical of the guy. I guess the common thread between the prof & the arctic explorers is that they're all walking on thin ice. Does a good job of explaining some of the difficulties of crossing sea ice. Maybe now I'll finally remember that Dartmouth is in New Hampshire.