Conquering the Impossible

There comes a point late in Conquering the Impossible, Mike Horn's account of traveling 12,000 miles around the Arctic Circle, where readers might feel like they've undertaken a similar journey. Not because the scenery isn't vivid — it is — but rather because it has gotten so repetitive. There's only so many ways to describe walking endlessly through the snow. Still, Horn undergoes an impressive journey as he walks and sails for 27 months, losing pieces of his fingers to frostbite, freezing his lungs in super-sub-zero frozen temperatures, and visiting lonely towns cut off from the rest of the world. One only wishes that he didn't insist on chronicling every iceberg encountered along the way. B-