A few years ago my sister who is legally blind, 'read' a talking book whose title I recognized. It was one we had acquired for our own private library and which I had read about a year earlier. My husband hadn't read it, though I recommended it to him in the highest possible terms of praise; a book superbly well written, on a topic he had once been fascinated with. My sister found the book boring, she told me. I had found it one of the best books on the topic of Arctic exploration I'd ever read.

And I have, in the past few years, read quite a number of books on Arctic and Antarctic exploration. When we were younger I was never interested, it was my husband's especial focus of interest. He was the one who read as many books as he could find on the exploration of the two Poles, never I.

When we were in our mid-teens we often visited the library together. It represented an event, an interesting one in our lives, since we were both devoted book readers. A few years later, still in our teens and by then married, we joined a book-of-the-month club which even we, on our meagre wages found ourselves able to afford. Others might spend their spare disposable income on eating out or paying for hairdressers and cosmetics; we had no such expenses.

Each month a packet of about six books would arrive; those we were interested in we would keep, the others would be returned and a nominal cost of $1 a book was levied on those we selected. Those selections introduced us to writers like J.Rider Haggard, Arthur Conan Doyle, F.Scott Fitzgerald, Rex Stout and many others who became our favourite-reading sources.

Thus began our home library. We hated giving up books, so we kept them, occasionally loaning one out, but rarely. The books were treasured and sometimes revisited. As my husband's interest in exploration of the Earth's frozen wastelands waned mine awakened not so long ago. A few days ago he was rummaging about in the library in between books and I once again urged The Ice Master upon him, this time successfully. Its full title is The Ice Master: The Doomed 1913 Voyage of the Karluk, by Jennifer Niven, and a better book of its kind would be difficult to find.

He now is familiar with why it is that I raved with such enthusiasm over the book. He tore through it in a matter of days. He always has one book that he reads during afternoon hours and another left on his night-table to be read before falling asleep. This was the focus of an afternoon-read session.

And it has given us the subject of lively conversations in discussing its merits and revelations of a wide array of issues, from peoples' characters -- contrasting the irresponsibility and self-promotion of Vilhjahmur  Stefansson's abandonment of the Canadian Arctic Expedition which he had signed on to captain for example, to the sterling organizational and command-reactive capabilities of the whaling captain who became the captain of the Karluk on this dramatic but failed venture, Captain Robert A. Bartlett.

"The two years, 1913 and 1914, saw the last two expeditions to the polar regions of the old historic type in the wooden ships and before the days of radio and aeroplanes - the Karluk to the north and Shackleton's Endurance to the south. Both vessels met the same fate. Both stories tell of strenuous journeys of seven or eight hundreds of miles to bring rescue. The Endurance story ended happily and has been fully and faithfully recorded; the other ended tragically but has never been well and truthfully documented", wrote William Laird McKinlay, who as a young man had been part of that doomed expedition.

Which he had himself in years afterward made an effort to document, and which had he still been living, he would have agreed had been more than elegantly and adequately documented by the writing skills and obvious empathetic understanding brought to the enterprise by the author of this outstandingly fine account.