I listened to *Arctic Airship: Disaster and Triumph Over the North Pole* by Buddy Levy on audiobook. All the other Arctic exploration books I've read have been about explorers on land or boats. This book is about polar exploration by airship—it looks like a huge inflatable cigar. Picture the Goodyear blimp.Various personalities attempted airship polar exploration, including Walter Wellman, Roald Amundsen, and Italian aeronautical engineer Umberto Nobile. The different nationalities, motivations,...

Buddy Levy, the author of *Arctic Airship: Disaster and Triumph Over the North Pole*, has penned several excellent books about polar expeditions, demonstrating a deep understanding of the triumphs and tragedies of early exploration. In this historical account, he focuses on three pioneering explorers who either succeeded or failed in their ambitious quests to be the first to fly over the North Pole in the early 20th century. The popularity of airships (dirigibles) was global at the time, as the...

Whoever said history is boring clearly hasn't read Buddy Levy! I just finished "Arctic Airship: Disaster and Triumph Over the North Pole" yesterday, and I'm still catching my breath. It's anything but dull! Levy's book plunges you into the dramatic race to the North Pole, focusing on the daring (and sometimes foolhardy) attempts of three explorers and their crews to conquer the Arctic skies by airship. He dives into the nitty-gritty details of these incredible machines – their design, construct...

My third book by Buddy Levy, an author who seems to be getting better with each release. Specializing in polar voyages gone wrong, "Arctic Airship: Disaster and Triumph Over the North Pole" tops them all and is a genuine page-turner. Books about the airship industry, which more or less began at the same time as the development of heavier-than-air aircraft, are fascinating in themselves (at least for me!). I discovered this in books like “Empires of the Sky.” But when you combine that with intrep...

“The polar airship age was an age of heroes, and the men who flew airships between 1906 and 1928, aeronauts Walter Wellman, Roald Amundson, Umberto Nobile, were the equivalent of the first astronauts.”Buddy Levy’s fascinating nonfiction, Arctic Airship: Disaster and Triumph Over the North Pole, tells the story of a lesser-known period in Arctic exploration history – a time in the early 1900s when explorers took (or tried to take) dirigibles to the North Pole. It focuses on the adventures of thre...

Thanks to NetGalley and St. Martin's Press for providing this much-appreciated historical non-fiction title. *Arctic Airship: Disaster and Triumph Over the North Pole* by Buddy Levy is an intensive and thoroughly researched factual account of early Arctic exploration, primarily focusing on the little-known fact that dirigibles were involved in the early 1900s. The author can't be faulted for his detailed description of all items, situations, and background, but the saying 'less is more' comes to...

Huge thanks to NetGalley and St. Martin's Press for the advanced copy of *Arctic Airship: Disaster and Triumph Over the North Pole* in exchange for an honest review!Back in 2023, I devoured Buddy Levy's *Empire of Ice and Stone: The Disastrous and Heroic Voyage of the Karluk*. So, when I saw another chance to dive into an ice-laden adventure through Levy's writing, saying yes was a no-brainer! I couldn't wait to crack open *Arctic Airship: Disaster and Triumph Over the North Pole*, and it totall...

An airship in the Arctic? What could go wrong? The answer is so, so much. Quite frankly, not nearly as much as I expected, though. As an avid reader of anything about the Arctic, I knew I would enjoy Buddy Levy's latest, Arctic Airship: Disaster and Triumph Over the North Pole. Adventure and survival stories are Levy's sweet spot, and I was not disappointed. Levy tells the story of three different Arctic campaigns aimed at the North Pole. My only wish is that I knew nothing about all three befo...

I was absolutely stunned. I never expected to read about an Arctic exploration team that was blessed by the Pope and funded by Mussolini. How did Fascist Italy even get involved in something like that?Their state-of-the-art airship was the big draw. After over a hundred years of sailing into the Arctic and finally reaching the North Pole, adventurers were looking for the next frontier. Cutting-edge air power technology – airplanes and dirigibles – seemed like the next vehicle for scientific disc...

In the early 20th century, some polar explorers opted for airships to reach their destinations—a novel, somewhat untested, and undeniably risky mode of transport. Buddy Levy's "Arctic Airship: Disaster and Triumph Over the North Pole" chronicles the journeys of Amundsen, Cook, Wellman, and Nobile, detailing their rivalries, failures, and triumphs in the Arctic. Personally, I found myself more intrigued by the airships themselves than the individual explorers, and the concluding chapter on contem...