Chicago Sun-Times: [ ADVENTURE BRIEFS ]

Ada Blackjack: A True Story of Survival in the Arctic, by Jennifer Niven (Hyperion, $24.95). Blackjack, a pint-sized Eskimo rumored to be a prostitute, was the only one of five people to make it back alive from two years on Wrangel Island, a desolate spit of land in the East Siberian Sea.

Four men signed up with explorer Vilhjalmur Stefansson, to spend 12 months there beginning in September, 1921. Stefansson had an idea that Wrangel could become an important air base, and urged his crew to take along an Eskimo or two to help them through the winter. The one Inuit who consented to join them was Blackjack. She could sew, but had never learned to live off the land, and she agreed to go because she desperately needed money and a new husband. When things went horribly wrong, she ended up alone for months with a corpse and a pet cat. She read from a Bible, prayed, typed up notes on a typewriter and taught herself to trap fox, hunt seal and duck, and even fashion a skiff from driftwood, canvas and animal skins. Once rescued, she received a fleeting hero's welcome as a female Robinson Crusoe.

Niven convincingly shows that Blackjack is every inch a folk hero, and the book succeeds as a sure-footed novelization of her forgotten story, spiked with occasional references to original sources -- including her diary -- that Niven recovered. As Niven makes her way through the fog of bad press -- at one point a New York paper accused Blackjack of murder -- she becomes less narrator than critic, and Ada Blackjack evolves from an engrossing fireside yarn to an equally engrossing parsing of legal and media machinations.

Four Against the Arctic: Shipwrecked for Six Years at the Top of the World by David Roberts (Simon & Schuster, $25). This book grew out of the first English translation of the Russian Valerian Albanov's In the Land of White Death. Roberts and Jon Krakauer brought out Albanov's grim masterpiece in 2000. Reading it, Roberts noted Albanov's reference, circa 1917, to "a team of Russian seal hunters who had been shipwrecked on one of the many islands of the Svalbard archipelago. ... Like the Swiss Family Robinson, they lived for seven years on that island, relatively happy and content." Impossible, Roberts thought. And so began a multi-year, multilingual hunt for a reliable account of the four "Mezen men" who, Roberts concludes, spent six years (not seven) on the island of Edgeoya in 1743-1749.

Roberts seems to have written this one at the speed of research, each failed fax, unreturned phone call or indecipherable passage leading to another eye-rolling anecdote. The book is a bit like an old episode of "The Rockford Files": Roberts gets constantly tripped up, sidelined or denied, but we trust that somehow he'll still get his men -- or, at least, find their long lost shack. Some of the rigmarole gets tedious -- enough about the interlibrary loan! Hasty writing shows itself, too, in repeated words. (Evidently, Russians tend to be "nonplussed." After a while, some readers might be, too.) Even so, when Roberts, a wilderness guide and two assistants finally reach Edgeoya, the book's pace -- and the reader's pulse -- quickens.

The Devil May Care: Fifty Intrepid Americans and Their Quest for the Unknown, edited by Tony Horwitz (Oxford, $28). Here's a collection of short profiles taken from The American National Biography, a British-edited compendium of 18,000 dead Americans, It's almost surprising not to find a chapter devoted to Ada Blackjack, as the book is chock-a-block with American "Adventurers, Explorers, Filibusters, Privateers, Spies" as memorable as she. For example Elisha Kent Kane a Philadelphia physician who mistook open water north of Ellesmere Island for a Northeast Passage, improvised his own remedy for scurvy (fresh rat meat) and tried to marry a teenaged "spirit rapper."

Culled by Blue Latitudes author Tony Horwitz, The Devil May Care fails to satisfy as a cover-to-cover read. Each of the chapters takes the exact same form. Imagine reading 50 obituaries in succession, and you have some idea. But dipped into now and again, the book presents a welcome chance to reflect on what motivated these eccentrics and pioneers, or what motivates any of us, really, to choose the lives we do.

Brad Wieners,

Washington Post