Quick Take
- Narration: Arthur Morey reads Hampton Sides’ prose with steady, authoritative clarity, never overdramatizing a story whose facts are extreme enough on their own terms.
- Themes: hubris and survival, the cost of ambition in unforgiving environments, how community forms and fractures under extreme pressure
- Mood: Harrowing and vast — narrative nonfiction that reads like a nineteenth-century adventure novel but carries the weight of true loss
- Verdict: Among the finest polar exploration narratives published in the past two decades; the audiobook format adds an isolating immersiveness to the experience that suits the material perfectly.
There is a specific category of historical narrative nonfiction that I find genuinely compelling, and it has less to do with the subject matter than with the quality of the reconstruction. Hampton Sides is one of the best practitioners of it working today. Blood and Thunder and Ghost Soldiers established him as someone who can enter the archive and come out with something that reads and feels like immersive literary fiction without departing from the documentary record. In the Kingdom of Ice is the book where he turned those skills toward the USS Jeanette expedition of 1879, and the result is, in the most precise sense, a masterwork of the form. I listened to seventeen and a half hours of Arthur Morey reading it during a late November when the nights were getting very long and very dark, and the symmetry felt appropriate.
The Jeanette sailed from San Francisco on July 8, 1879, under the command of Captain George Washington De Long, with thirty-two men and the backing of James Gordon Bennett Jr., the flamboyant publisher of the New York Herald. The stated mission was to be the first nation to reach the North Pole. The actual experience, beginning roughly twenty-two months into the voyage when the ship was caught in pack ice north of Siberia, was two years of imprisonment in the ice, then a sinking, then a thousand-mile march across the Arctic in conditions that cost many of the men everything. Sides reconstructs this from diaries, letters, naval records, and testimony, and the result is a narrative with the detail and momentum of lived experience.
The Discipline of Reconstruction
What separates In the Kingdom of Ice from disaster narrative written at a lower level of craft is Sides’ insistence on understanding his subjects as full human beings before putting them in jeopardy. The first section of the book establishes De Long, his wife Emma, the crew, and the context of American national ambition in the post-Civil War period with patience and specificity. We understand what the men are leaving behind. We understand what they believe they are sailing toward. We understand the era’s scientific theories about a warm open polar sea that made the expedition seem plausible rather than suicidal. By the time the ice closes around the Jeanette’s hull, the loss is personal rather than abstract. You have spent enough time with these men to feel their situation as something more than a historical event.
The survival narrative that constitutes the book’s second half is harrowing in a way that does not depend on Sides’ prose being intense — it depends on the facts themselves being extreme, rendered with enough precision that the listener’s imagination can fully inhabit them. Snow blindness, polar bear encounters, ferocious storms, rations running out, groups splitting and some not surviving: all of this is reported with documentary honesty rather than dramatized for effect. The restraint makes it more affecting, not less. The trust Sides places in his material is one of the marks of a writer at the top of his craft.
Morey’s Reading and the Right Tone for Catastrophe
Arthur Morey was exactly the right choice for this material. His voice has a quality I would describe as sober authority — it does not perform emotion, but it does not suppress it either. In the sections where De Long writes in his diary about his men dying, Morey reads with the flatness of someone recording facts that happen to be unbearable, and that flatness is precisely the register De Long himself used. The expedition members, officers especially, had been trained to a kind of stoicism about suffering that sounds inhuman until you understand it as adaptive. Morey’s delivery captures that training while leaving room for the humanity beneath it, and the space between those two things is where Sides’ book lives.
At seventeen hours and thirty minutes, this is a long audiobook, and the listening experience benefits from being spread across multiple sessions. Sides structures the book in a way that creates natural break points, and giving yourself time between sessions to let the isolation and cold settle before returning creates something close to the immersive reading experience the subject matter demands. The 4.6 rating from more than thirty-five hundred listeners reflects genuine quality; this is not a book that attracts casual five-star reviews from genre fans.
What Sides Understands About Ambition and Its Costs
The Jeanette expedition sits within a broader American story about post-Civil War national ambition and the late nineteenth century’s belief that scientific and technological capability had made the impossible merely difficult. Sides provides enough of that cultural analysis that the expedition’s tragedy carries its proper weight: these men died in service of an idea about what America was and could do, and the idea was wrong in specific and documentable ways. The book is not cynical about ambition. It is honest about what ambition costs when it outpaces knowledge and when the environment it meets has no interest in human aspirations whatsoever. The Arctic does not care about the Gilded Age, and that indifference is the book’s final subject.
Who Should Listen and Who Should Skip
Listeners who respond to narrative nonfiction with the texture and pacing of literary fiction will find this an essential listen. Fans of Erik Larson’s work will recognize the methodology and the quality. Skip it if you need your narrative nonfiction to move quickly or if seventeen hours of harrowing Arctic survival sounds more draining than compelling. This is a long, cold, emotionally demanding book, and those qualities are precisely why it is extraordinary.
Frequently Asked Questions
How does In the Kingdom of Ice compare to other polar exploration narratives like Alfred Lansing’s Endurance?
Both books share a commitment to documentary precision and character-driven reconstruction, but Sides covers a less familiar expedition than Shackleton’s, which gives this book more discovery value for most readers. Lansing’s prose is leaner; Sides provides more cultural and historical context. Both reward listeners equally.
Does Arthur Morey’s narration handle the scientific and navigational details clearly for non-specialist listeners?
Yes. Morey paces through the technical material — navigation, ice conditions, the physics of the Jeanette’s situation — with the same authoritative clarity he brings to the human drama. Listeners without sailing or navigation knowledge will follow everything without difficulty.
Is In the Kingdom of Ice paced like a thriller or more like traditional historical narrative?
The pacing is historical narrative, not thriller. The suspense comes from genuine uncertainty about who survives and how, rather than from constructed plot escalation. Listeners expecting thriller pacing will find Sides more measured and richer for it; those who appreciate immersive historical reconstruction will find the pacing exactly right.
Is the Jeanette expedition well enough known that the book feels like confirmation of a familiar story?
Genuine discovery for most readers. The Jeanette expedition is not widely known outside specialist circles, and Sides treats the unfamiliarity as an asset, introducing every major figure and event as if for the first time. The ending carries real force even for listeners who research the expedition beforehand.
