NONFICTION: "The Ice Balloon," by Alec Wilkinson

Thirty-three years after Swedish explorer S.A. Andrée attempted to reach the North Pole, his headless corpse and preserved diary were stumbled upon by a geologist on White Island in the Arctic Ocean. In 1930, when the discovery was made, Andrée had long ago slipped away from the consciousness of those who followed his unsuccessful exploration. He had become a statistic, one of 751 out of 1,000 explorers in the 19th century who paid with their lives for the chance to reach the coldest place on the planet. The difference between Andrée and the other 750 was that his preferred mode of travel was a 97-foot-tall, 3,000-pound silk balloon filled with hydrogen.

In "The Ice Balloon," Alec Wilkinson, New Yorker magazine writer and author of nine books, gives readers a bone-chilling account of a journey gone terribly bad in the harshest conditions possible. Using journals and photographs, Wilkinson not only recounts Andrée's fateful flight but also expertly reconstructs the sagas of many other courageous, if not foolhardy, "penitents, mourners, long-shot followers," whose ambitions and hubris led them to an early and hideous demise.

Also roaming the frozen tundra was the unlucky American Adolphus Greely, whose 1881 expedition ended horribly after three years of miserable starvation and degradation. When the seven remaining men were rescued they were found incoherent, crawling "about on their hands and knees over the rock and ice."

In "The Ice Balloon," unlike many of his other books, Wilkinson is more researcher than reporter, but his superb storytelling skills shine on every page. The descriptions that Andrée and his expedition mates wrote about the harsh but stunning Arctic landscape, and the slow, agonizing march to their inevitable deaths make for riveting armchair reading. After the balloon comes down, the grand ambitions of the journey turn to simply surviving another unending day in a sea of shifiting ice floes and predatory polar bears.

For the 19th-century explorer, romantic notions often trumped sanity. Wilkinson expertly shows the reader that Andrée was different from his brethren. He was a futurist, whose day job was in a patent office, and he employed the most modern devices and was methodical in his preparations. But in the end his fate was no different than that of the most vain and unprepared adventurer.

Just hours before the ice balloon launch, Andrée was asked by a journalist when the world might hear from him again. He answered, "At least not before three months; and one year, perhaps two years, may elapse before you hear from us ... and if not -- if you never hear from us -- others will follow in our wake until the unknown regions of the north have been surveyed."

Stephen J. Lyons' latest book is "The 1,000-Year Flood: Destruction, Loss, Rescue, and Redemption Along the Mississippi River." He is at work on a book about the Driftless Region of the Upper Midwest.