HOWZAT

No British polar explorers now trust simply to luck, pluck, God or gentlemanly grit to get them to the North Pole and back. Hadow learnt early what it would take to trek to the North Pole: he’d been working as a business agent for top sports personalities. He was savvy about corporate sponsorship, media manipulation and the financial complexities of a career at the highest levels of international competitive sports. Trouble was, he wanted to jump his desk to the other side of the business: “The real question in life is not what you want to be, but what you want to do.” What he wanted to do was get to the North Pole alone and unsupported. His book tells how he did it.

FACING THE FROZEN OCEAN
BY BEAR GRYLLS
Pan, £7.99

In this book about his attempt, with four friends, to complete the first unassisted crossing of the icy North Atlantic in an open rigid inflatable boat, Grylls questions the gung-ho adjectives “eccentric” and “brave” that are applied to adventurers. He admits to feeling “both afraid and vulnerable”; and, though he sometimes takes risks, he is by nature cautious: “The more times you get lucky, the worse your odds become.” Men like Grylls set themselves extreme challenges, and come home as inspirational speakers with tales to harrow our imaginations. Grylls frets at this: “I sense that people live their own dreams through explorers . . . I am not sure I want to be the sacrifice for these people’s urges.”

BIG DEAD PLACE
BY NICHOLAS JOHNSON
Feral House, £10.99

Even in Antarctica, hash still needs to be slung, dishes need to be washed, and the support workers at the three high-tech science bases operated for the US Government by the Raytheon Cpmpany are not often happy bunnies. They are mostly neurotic misfits. A SWAT team of corporate psychologists is sent in every year to assess personnel for symptoms of lunacy before the long, cold Antarctic night closes in. Johnson’s savagely funny story of life “Inside the Strange and Menacing World of Antarctica” is a grunt’s-eye view of fear and loathing, arrogance and insanity in a dysfunctional, dystopian closed community. It’ s like M*A*S*H on ice, a bleak, black comedy.

PRINCES AMONG MEN
BY GARETH CARTWRIGHT
Serpent’s Tail, £11.99

Enthusiasm for “World Music” has made international stars of musicians whose performances might have remained a minority interest. Intrepid DJs, followed cautiously by record executives, have identified tribal and ethnic music across every continent and brought home the multicultural goods. Cartwright, a music journalist, here reminds them that there is minority music in Europe that has remained an underground and hitherto unheard secret. He travelled on a magical mystery tour of the Balkans in 2003 to seek out the Roma communities. Roma music is redolent with Gypsy lore, language, passion and personality. He found a vibrant, living musical tradition that is central to pan-European culture.

CROSSTOWN TRAFFIC
BY CHARLES SHAAR MURRAY
Faber, £9.99

Some readers may complain, sometimes justifiably, that a writer shouldn’t keep revisiting his books, reworking them and reissuing them with top-up material — but, as with biographies of Bob Marley Bowie, Dylan and others, there’s always something else to say. Murray’s biog of Jimi Hendrix was respectfully received first in 1989, then again in 2001, and here we are again in 2005 with a third edition that has survived the ravages of time and British rock music writing to stand as a tribute not only to “Jimi Hendrix and Post-War Pop”, but as a jolt of cultural electricity to anyone whose memories of the Sixties are becoming too comfortably nostalgic.

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