Four Against the Arctic: Shipwrecked for Six Years at ... (ISBN 0743272315)

Should be titled "The Search for the Story of Four Against the Arctic":
This book is NOT the story of the four Russian sailors shipwrecked for four years in the Arctic. It is the story of the author researching the story of the four Russians. He does uncover some interesting bits about early Russian and Norwegian Arctic exploration but it is all buried in 288 pages of the author's self importance.

It Goes Nowhere:
I kept going with this book because I felt it just had to get better at some point-but it doesn't. As other reviewers have pointed out, this is a story about research, not about the four men who survived the shipwreck. I was hoping the polar bears would get the whole boring lot of them, but no luck with that, either.

Everything it says it is, and more.:
It is difficult to understand why anyone would state as a COMPLAINT that "The book is about David Roberts and his research into a survival story." Yes, that is EXACTLY what it is. Roberts' story-within-a-story is accessable, immediate, often humorously self-disparaging, and it shows a drive for knowledge which one can only admire. I was captured by the end of the first paragraph of the introduction, and I couldn't put it down. Great stuff.

Ego Trip:
While the parts about the Russian sailors are interesting, the book rapidly degrades into the author's ego trip as the book becomes more about what a clever researcher he is and less about the sailors. What a shame.

A bit misleading:
I got this book because the title seemed to suggest it would be a story about FOUR AGAINST THE ARCTIC. It's not. The book is an endless description of David Roberts research into the story I hoped to learn more about. While Roberts telling of his story is creative and his research thorough, this reader would have appreciated having a title that described what the book was really about. This is not the first time I have seen a book title by this publisher that seems to mislead readers just a bit. It's disappointing.