Enhanced by charming, detailed illustrations, a study of interest in reaching and exploring the Arctic provides information on the many expeditions, successful and unsuccessful, to the region made by people from all over the world over hundreds of years. Grade 4-7AAn attractive, readable compilation of arctic exploration from the earliest recorded voyage by Pytheas of Greece (around 330 B.C.) to the end of the so-called "classic era" of exploration in the early 1900s (with some notes on later efforts). This handsome, slender volume provides a clear introduction to the multifaceted variety of arctic explorers and the diverse motivations for their dangerousAand often fatalAjourneys into this forbidding, hostile environment. Graced with rich, stylized acrylic paintings covering full- and double-pages, the book will satisfy all esthetically and many informationally, and will have the intellectually curious demanding more details.APatricia Manning, formerly at Eastchester Public Library, NY Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc. From Curlee (Ships of the Air, 1996, etc.), a riveting history of Arctic exploration that begins, appropriately, with the Inuit, who moved into that bleak and treacherous land after the Ice Age. With little documented history of that period, the narrative plunges ahead to the stories of Pytheas, a Greek merchant of the fourth century b.c., and Saint Brendan, the Irish monk who plied the North Atlantic waters in an oxhide boat in a.d. 550, discovering icebergs and perhaps Iceland. Next came the Norsemen on their way to Vinland in North America around a.d. 1000, followed by the late 16th-century English and Dutch explorers hoping to reach China (including John Davis and his ships Sunneshine and Mooneshine). Curlee chronicles the efforts of the merchants and whalers, the labors for fortune and glory, the search for the northern passages, the misery of scurvy and arctic fever. He dwells on Fridtjof Nansen's efforts, highlights the 1845 disappearance of Sir John Franklin's party, and provides a balanced look at the quest for the North Pole featuring Peary and Cook and their vainglorious (and unwarranted) claims. Curlee rounds out this entertaining, informed history with unsensationalized episodes of cannibalism and toes snapping off to keep readers glued to the pages, and hypnotic, elemental paintings that are just as exquisite as those in his first book. (map, chronology, bibliography, index) (Nonfiction. 8-12) -- Copyright ©1998, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved. Lynn Curlee is a fine artist whose work has been exhibited extensively. Mr. Curlee lives in Jamesport, New York, with Willie, his Great Dane.