SOURCE: "Heavy Sledding," in London Review of Books, Vol. 11, December 21, 1989, pp. 22-3.

In the following review, Loomis notes Berton's eye for detail and his ability to make difficult material appealing to readers.

In the 19th century, Canada's Arctic Archipelago proved to be an explorer's nightmare, a maze of straits, channels, gulfs, inlets, sounds, shoals, peninsulas and islands that confounded even the best navigators. Looking at its jigsaw configurations on a modern map, we can understand why its uncharted straits and channels were often mistaken by the pessimistic for dead-end inlets, its inlets by the optimistic for straits and channels—its islands for peninsulas, its peninsulas for islands. Exacerbating the problem was ice, especially floe and pack ice. Protean and shifting, it also could be fatally solid, and it made the geography of the Arctic unstable: a passage clear one week could be clogged the next, and even accurate...