Too many recent books on polar exploration have been dull, survivalist accounts of how the author “got there” single-handed, at record-breaking speed. All too often they come home with a self-aggrandising tale of their own heroism. Sir Wally Herbert, who can lay claim to being Britain’s most eminent living explorer, would describe such journeys as “slam-dunk” affairs, where the value of discovery has been lost in the eagerness to be the fastest to an already-reached goal.Herbert has said that for anyone to understand either Pole, they need to over-winter there; he lived closely with Inuit hunters for many years, taking his family to Greenland. In 1969, Herbert and his Trans-Arctic Expedition were the first to reach the North Pole on foot, a triumph overshadowed by the Moon landings. It took a scandalous 30 years before his achievement was finally recognised with a knighthood.
Now his daughter has returned to the Arctic Circle for a book that travels far less than its rivals, but delivers considerably more.

Rather than set off for the Pole, Kari Herbert spends time with the Inuit community she grew up with as a child Much has changed, not all for the better. Her father’s great friend Avatak has been shot by his wife in a drunken argument: the community have been forced to move from a small island to a less appealing modern township on the mainland; Kari’s own sister has died.Together with Avatak’s children, Kari tries to make sense of the events that have hardened like an autumn ice-pack around them, and it is this sense of suffering and loss that gives this book its depth. This is an elegy both for her own childhood and the Arctic, telling of “the depression that always waits for the Eskimo” and of how the world has intruded even in this remote wilderness. Even Dwight Eisenhower, a professional soldier and not a politician, sounded like Demosthenes compared with the White House’s re-elected incumbent.

Of the latter, McWhorter shows how Americans’ new lack of belief in rhetoric means that speeches are no longer vehicles for the communication of ideas. He shows how an aspirational appreciation of formal conventions has disappeared from the written American landscape, dismissed now as pompous and outmoded. Written language is increasingly either talk-like and chatty, or wooden and banal.The effect extends throughout all communications, from personal correspondence to political speeches once reprinted by newspapers. In such matters, McWhorter is a relativist, as befits his position as a professor of linguistics, one happy to see new constructions and new usages.What alarms him is a growing loss of traditional features and strengths in the written American language caused by infection from its spoken counterpart. The decline of written speech is evidenced, for McWhorter, by a growing informality that robs it of distinctiveness and distinction.