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Summary: A wonderful book...
Review: Christopher Pala brings the polar regions to life with his accounts of important but long forgotten or ignored expeditions. He describes his own trip to the Pole with wit and humor. A great book, don't miss it
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Summary: I have just come back from this exact same trip
Review: Do you want to experience a fantastic adventure vacation? Just read this book and you will see just exactly why Christopher Pala fell in love with going to the North Pole. Believe me! It's true! I have just come back from this exact same expedition and I'm going back next year. It's not just going to the North Pole that is fantastic it's the process of getting there. Staying in the Khatanga hotel in Northern Siberia, sleeping in the cabin on Sredney Island, flying in all of the Russian planes and meeting the Russian people, that's fantastic. But there's a lot more, it's the other people that you meet on the expedition that are going along with you. They will be your friends for life. One man on our expedition was a former Mig-21 pilot, just one week before he went to the pole he flew a Mig-25 to 80,000 feet, next he stood on the North Pole, and two days after he returned from the expedtion he launched a rocket over the pole from Vandenburg Air Force Base. Another man was one of the world's top Neural Network Computer scientist, we had a webmaster from yellowairplane.com, a banker from Singapore, two skiiers that have previously crossed Antarctica and Greenland, a journalist from Denmark, a mag-lev railroad scientist and a lot more. We had seven skydivers which jumped from ten thousand feet over the pole and the oldest lady, ever, to go to the North Pole. This book tells it all and exactly why you would want to go there yourself. It's fantastic, you absolutely need to read this one.C. Jeff Dyrek, now, arctic explorer
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Summary: A light in a foreign land...
Review: I truly enjoyed reading this book while travelling this fall. It is witty, exotic, engaging and informative. Gives you some background and history into past expeditions and brings it into context of today. Christopher a true adventurer!
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Summary: Trust the man who's been there
Review: There's been a sudden rush of books coming out on the North Pole. Chris Pala's stands out because he's actually been there -- five times, in fact. He takes the sagas of history's most daring polar expeditions, and weaves them into lively accounts of current-day adventure tourism to the "big stick," complemented with a vivid record of his own "expedition to nowhere" in which he and companion Sylvia write themselves into the pages of polar history by running treadmill for several days on the drifting polar ice pack. Pala's command of the Russian language also gives him special insight into the role of all-too-neglected Russian arctic explorers. A labor of love, written in an engaging, accessible style, that's a must-read for armchair North Pole adventurers. (Review first posted on Amazon.co.uk)
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Summary: The New Hemingway
Review: This book has it all. Sex, adventure, politics, the Russian mafia, beautiful women and a finely crafted sense of wonder for the exotic and the unreachable. The storyline revolves around a superficially bleak and uninterestiing place, the so called frozen arctic wastes of popular imagination. Chris Pala brings it all alive with a humorous and discerning touch. No armchair adventurer will be able to put this down, and no one will ever read the National Geographic magazine with the same reverence again. A wordly foreign correspondent in the distant "stans, Pala may be the new Hemingway.
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