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Kent doesn't explain why he set out in a sailboat for Greenland in the summer of 1929, with two much younger men he didn’t know. He leapt at the idea, and even when they steered into catastrophe he never lost his wry, can-do spirit, or the restless curiosity that led him to keep leaving behind his successful artistic career in New York for the most remote parts of the world. For all the fame of Kent's wood-cut illustration style (on display in this lovely book as in a legendary edition of Moby-Dick), he is an equally elegant writer, good-humored and observant, with a Thoreauean taste for turning physical description into metaphor, and thereby into philosophy