Andrea Pitzer

"The human story has always been one of perseverance-- often against remarkable odds. The most astonishing survival tale of all might be that of 16th-century Dutch explorer William Barents and his crew of sixteen, who ventured farther north than any Europeans before and, on their third polar exploration, lost their ship off the frozen coast of Nova Zembla to unforgiving ice. The men would spend the next year fighting off ravenous polar bears, gnawing...

Argues that the famous Russian-American novelist, accused of turning a blind eye to the horrors of history, hid this disturbing information within his fiction.