352 • REVIEWS Walter Wellman), the Baldwin-Ziegler Polar Expedition (commanded by Evelyn Briggs Baldwin, a veteran of Wellman’s expedition, and funded by baking powder baron William Ziegler), and the Ziegler Polar Expedition (Ziegler’s second sponsored expedition, led by Anthony Fiala, formerly of the Brooklyn Eagle ). As Capelotti notes in the volume’s introductory materials, the history of American exploration of Franz Josef Land could be told only in fragments until recently, when expeditionary diaries, journals, and materials became newly available to scholars. (Capelotti is also one of the few Americans to have visited the islands in the past century.) This history, he argues, was driven by a late-19th-century American media hunger for stories of extremity. Gilded Age industrialists and newspaper magnates underwrote expeditions in exchange for publicity. Capelotti notes that patronage-driven geographical naming practices were another goal of these expeditions: backers could expect an honorifc cape, island, or strait as thanks for fnancial support of the American expeditions. As he writes succinctly in the book’s preface, “the American exploration of Franz Josef Land was both a direct product of the spectacular levels of untaxed private wealth of the Gilded Age and a monument to that age’s inevitable collapse” (p. xviii). The lack of sustainable, community- minded leadership of turn-of-the-century titans of industry fnds its analogue in the ambitious yet bumbling American explorations of Franz Josef Land. The story of the three American expeditions unfolds in short, punchy chapters, and Capelotti is adroit in narrativizing a broad range of evidence. The details are thick and dizzying, and none is spared, but the overall account will captivate students, scholars, and enthusiasts of American and Arctic history, science, and culture. The expeditions were fractious, which likely was the case for most polar explorations in history; rarely, though, has a scholar had access to such a substantial body of diaries and letters in order to expose the tensions that are often glossed over or elided in offcial expeditionary narratives. Capelotti brings these moments to light with relish. Of a newspaper description of the explorer’s striking eyes written before the departure of Baldwin’s expedition Capelotti observes: “Given his erratic behavior—a tincture of paranoia laced with delusions of grandeur—the ‘piercing steel grey eyes’ can now be seen for what they were, a physical manifest of [his] increasingly unbalanced mind” (p. 247). At the end of the expedition, Baldwin seized most of the private diaries and correspondence of the crew in order to protect his reputation; his calamitous failure to lead the men with any purpose, confdence, or skill would be comic if it weren’t so chilling. Anthony Fiala, whom Capelotti describes as the “most irrepressibly guileless” of Baldwin’s men, would go on to lead the third American venture to Franz Josef Land, with even less competence. The expedition was plagued by the loss of the ship, America, crushed by tremendous ice pressure; interpersonal conficts did not ease the crisis. One of the most acidly interesting details in The Greatest Show in the Arctic is the “venomous little collection” of “Fialaisms” kept by the expedition’s doctor, George Shorkley, who was annoyed by what Capelotti calls Fiala’s “uncontrolled need to spout profundities that were either absurdly pretentious or hopelessly inappropriate” (p. 390). Among the “Fialaisms” are the following claims, as recorded by Shorkley: “[After fainting]: ‘Why, this is strange! Just before coming away, I wore out four strong men, one after the other, at fencing’” and “I am the only male member of the ‘Ladies Aid Society’” (p. 391). Capelotti might have provided a broader overview of newspapers’ stunt-publishing in the period, giving readers a sense of where Arctic exploration ft into their commercial strategic plans. How common, in other words, was it for newspapers or for industrialists to promote adventurous voyages? Is Arctic exploration meaningfully different from other travels at the turn of the century, or were these the previous century’s versions of Elon Musk’s SpaceX or Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic, designed to send private citizens to space? The Greatest Show in the Arctic could do more, too, to distinguish capitalist geographical naming practices from imperial or national ones: what is the difference between naming an inlet for a captain of industry, say, and naming an inlet for a captain of a naval vessel? How do such differences register on a global scale, and might this be evidence for a shift from an age of nationalism to an age of capital? The Greatest Show in the Arctic is evocative enough to propel such questions, and readers are indebted to this volume for the means to pose them. Capelotti’s deft and much-needed account of messy, determined, bungling, aspirational American expeditions to Franz Josef Land will fre the imagination of any reader. Hester Blum English Department Penn State University 313 Burrowes Building University Park, Pennsylvania 16802, USA hester.blum@psu.edu THE ARCTIC GUIDE: WILDLIFE OF THE FAR NORTH. By SHARON CHESTER. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2016. ISBN 978-0-691- 13975-3 (pbk.). 544 p. Includes introductions to higher taxonomic units (orders, families, genera), colour illus., species distribution maps, selected bib., web sites, indexes to scientifc names of families, genera, and common English names for taxa. Softbound. US$27.95; £22.00. This is an ambitiously inclusive guide to characteristic species of circum-Arctic fauna and fora in a single volume. Its illustrations are excellent, the species accounts in the text are concise and informative, species’ identities nearly error-free, and their formal scienti fc names almost all