Realm of Ice and Sky

Realm of Ice and Sky- Buddy Levy

St. Martin's Press

Release Date: January 28, 2025

Rating: 📚📚📚📚

Synopsis: Arctic explorer and American visionary Walter Wellman pioneered both polar and trans-Atlantic airship aviation, making history’s first attempts at each. Wellman has been cast as a self-promoting egomaniac known mostly for his catastrophic failures. Instead he was a courageous innovator who pushed the boundaries of polar exploration and paved the way for the ultimate conquest of the North Pole—which would be achieved not by dogsled or airplane, but by airship.

American explorer Dr. Frederick Cook was the first to claim he made it to the North Pole in 1908. A year later, so did American Robert Peary, but both Cook’s and Peary’s claims had been seriously questioned. There was enough doubt that Norwegian explorer extraordinaire Roald Amundsen—who’d made history and a name for himself by being first to sail through the Northwest Passage and first man to the South Pole—picked up where Walter Wellman left off, attempting to fly to the North Pole by airship. He would go in the Norge, designed by Italian aeronautical engineer Umberto Nobile. The 350-foot Norge flew over the North Pole on May 12, 1926, and Amundsen was able to accurately record and verify their exact location. 

However, the engineer Nobile felt slighted by Amundsen. Two years later, Nobile returned, this time in the Italia, backed by Prime Minister Benito Mussolini. This was an Italian enterprise, and Nobile intended to win back the global accolades and reputation he believed Amundsen had stripped from him. The journey ended in disaster, death, and accusations of cannibalism, launching one of the great rescue operations the world had ever seen.

Realm of Ice and Sky is the thrilling narrative of polar exploration via airship―and the men who sacrificed everything to make history.

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I've become fascinated in a trainwreck kind of way with Arctic exploration and really enjoyed Levy's Laybrinth of Ice, so I was eager to give Realm of Ice and Sky a try. I had no idea people were trying to explore the Arctic by dirigible in the early 20th century so this was all new for me. The idea sounded crazy and dangeous, but then, so did going to the Arctic in the first place!

Ice and Sky is three different stories in one book, covering the highlights (and lowlights) of aerial Arctic exploration. There was a lot of science on what the dirigibles needed, most of which went over my head, but I found the human stories of how difficult it was to put the missions together and estimate when the weather would be best for flying to be interesting. The crews faced surprising levels of danger in the air beyond wind currents buffeting the ships.

The third story, of the Italia, is the longest and the bigest tragedy- so probably the one I found most interesting. With it you get the familiar Arctic land dangers as well as the new aerial dangers. You get people of different nations banding together to try and help find the explorers but a surprising lack of coordination among the searchers. I would have been interested to hear if this was common in past searches as well or more unique to the Italia, but Levy doesn't go into that aspect.

Overall an intersting chapter of Arctic exploration I had never heard of before. Readers interested in adding to their knowledge of Arctic exploration will definitely enjoy this book.

I received a DRC from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review