Frozen in Time

Starred review from March 11, 2013
In this harrowing true-life adventure, journalist Zuckoff (Lost in Shangri-La) follows the crew of an American B-17 bomber that crash-landed in 1942—while searching for another downed plane—on a vast glacier in the Greenland ice cap, one of the most isolated and inhospitable places on earth. With little food or cold-weather gear and an assortment of nasty injuries, the nine airmen found themselves trapped in a field of hidden, ever-shifting crevasses that threatened to swallow up their plane and made hiking even a few yards a mortal danger. Zuckoff juxtaposes their months-long battle against hurricane-blizzards, starvation, frost-bite, gangrene and madness with equally perilous rescue attempts by sled teams and military aviators flying through gales and white-outs. (His tense first-hand account of a 2012 expedition to locate the remains of one of those rescue flights buried in 30-foot-deep ice frames the story.) Zuckoff’s gripping narrative unfolds with immediacy and verve as men in fetid snow caves and sputtering aircraft pit their dogged camaraderie and desperate, white-knuckle improvisations against the fury of an Arctic winter. Photos.

December 1, 2012

The author of the best-selling Lost in Shangri-La recounts the November 1942 crash of a U.S. cargo plane into the Greenland Ice Cap, the loss of the B-17 sent to find it, and the loss of a Grumman Duck amphibious plane that had managed to rescue one B-17 crew member. The remaining crew endured 148 days of Arctic winter before finally being rescued. With a 200,000-copy first printing.

Copyright 2012 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.