SOURCE: “In a Cold Climate,” in Washington Post Book World, April 10, 1994, p. 7.

In the following review, Drabelle offers favorable assessment of The Birthday Boys.

Fifteen years ago an iconoclast struck what may be the most telling blow to an English reputation since Lytton Strachey took aim at his Eminent Victorians. The aggressor was journalist Roland Huntford. The target was Robert Falcon Scott, Scott of the Antarctic, the very incarnation of English heroism in a lost cause, whose last written words—scribbled feebly in 1912 as he and his two surviving comrades lay tentbound and starving after coming in second to the South Pole expedition led by the Norwegian Roald Amundsen—included this self-serving tribute: “I do not think human beings ever came through such a month as we have come through.”

In his book Scott and Amundsen, Huntford demonstrated that the inept Scott had only himself to blame. In...