This is the thrilling story of visionary explorer S. A. Andrée, who in 1897 attempted to discover the North Pole by flying to it in a hydrogen balloon. The book opens in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, when nations vied for the greatest discoveries of the planet's still unknown spaces and newspapers followed every journey. It was also an age of scientific discovery, and Alec Wilkinson shows how these two cultural trends came together in the Swedish engineer S. A. Andrée, leading him to launch perhaps the most daring assault on the North Pole ever made. Andrée's flight and the journey, based on the expedition's diaries and photographs dramatically recovered thirty-three years after the balloon came down, provide a book filled with suspense and adventure, a haunting story of high ambition and courage made tangible with the detail, beauty, and devastating conditions of traveling and dwelling on the ice.