Word: arctics
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...summer in the high Himalayas, but photographer Robert Nickelsberg borrowed a heavy-duty arctic snowsuit to cover this week's story on war on the Siachen Glacier between India and Pakistan. Just as well: he was stranded by a blizzard at a military camp 17,400 ft. up. Later, during an artillery exchange, Nickelsberg tried to dash to a better position only to discover that the thin air made it "nearly impossible to run." The rigors behind him, Nickelsberg sent back the first combat pictures seen in the West of this little-known conflict...
...exploration. It presents not just the evidence of its subjects' misdeeds -- or nondeeds -- but the details of two extraordinary lives. Despite his claims, Cook never really tried to reach the North Pole. In 1908 he simply set up a camp with two Eskimo boys near the shore of the Arctic Ocean, stayed there for a number of days, then returned home and announced success. Peary tried repeatedly, with all his energy, and in 1909, at the age of 53, nearly made it. But the speeds and distances he claimed to have traveled, Herbert demonstrates, were far beyond the ability...
...Peary-Cook rivalry began peaceably. Cook, nine years younger, was a steady, valued medical officer on Peary's first Arctic expedition. But Peary jealously guarded the acclaim he earned from the geographical establishment and the millionaires who ran it, so Cook set out on his own. Before long Peary was slurring Cook with the comment that the Arctic "brings a man face to face with himself . . . If he is a man, the man comes out; and if he is a cur, the cur shows as quickly...
...Denali (Mount McKinley). To what degree Peary admitted to himself that he was a fraud is unknown. So is the extent to which Matthew Henson, his unswerving black assistant, understood the fudging. Herbert writes sympathetically of all these voyagers, whose real accomplishments were extraordinary. They were married to the Arctic, and perhaps the truth of the matter was that if they had to fake triumphs in order to return there, they would fake them...
Harvard Square felt positively arctic by comparison: the Crimson thermometer registered only 99 degrees at 1:20 p.m. And in the climate-controlled environs of Lamont and Pusey libraries, the thermometer read only 76. But in the lightless depths of the Widener Library stacks, a set of open windows prefigured a 94 degree reading...