Ken McGoogan

RACE TO THE POLAR SEA:
The Heroic Adventures of
Elisha Kent Kane

Race to the Polar Sea: The Heroic Adventures of Elisha Kent Kane will be published in autumn 2008. It tells the story of a daring nineteenth-century explorer who went in search of an Open Polar Sea at the top of the world, hoping to rescue survivors from a lost expedition led by Sir John Franklin.

Race to the Polar Sea is the fourth and final volume in Ken's Fatal Passage Quartet. You can read all about it in the April-May issue of The Beaver magazine. At this point, you should know three things.

1. The book is timely. Everybody has seen the headlines. The retreat of the polar ice cap has put the Arctic on front pages around the world. Certainly, Race to the Polar Sea arises out of the nineteenth century. But Elisha Kane was the most literate of all explorers. And he left such a vivid word-picture of the Arctic that it constitutes a singular touchstone. In September 2007, while sailing in the Northwest Passage, where once Kane struggled through upraised tables of ice fourteen feet thick, Ken encountered nothing but open water. That contrast makes this book relevant: it speaks to global warming.

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