Kate's Reviews > The Polar Adventures of a Rich American Dame: A Life of Louise Arner Boyd

I am eager to read this book based on the author's article in the Feb. 14, 2019, Smithsonian. Women have often been left out of exploration stories (I'm thinking of Josephine Peary, who not only accompanied her husband on his polar expeditions, but gave birth to her first child less than 13 degrees from the North Pole—the first Caucasian baby to be born so far north), and it appears Joanna Kafarowski has taken on the task of correcting that oversight, not a simple task. So I look forward to getting and reading the book.

The article, however, states that mountaineer and geologist Noel Odell accompanied Boyd on one of her maritime expeditions, adding that Odell was "the only survivor of the tragic British Mount Everest Expedition of 1924." Actually a six-man team attempted to reach the summit of
Everest: Odell, Teddy Norton, Howard Somerville, Geoffrey Bruce, Andrew Irvine, and George Mallory. Only two, Mallory and Irvine, didn't survive. I'm not blaming Kafarowski for this oversight. Biographical nonfiction takes an inordinate amount of research and fact-checking (as do all published writings worth reading, I would think). It's why editors and proofreaders were so essential to reputable publishers in the 19th and 20th century. They helped the author to verify that, along with being succinctly written and grammatically correct, the information could be trusted to be correct--or at least as accurate as humanly possible. At some point, publishers realized that a few spelling errors, grammatical mistakes, and inaccurate information didn't affect the bottom line, which has set up the situation of "let the reader beware." Dundurn Press appears to be a reputable publisher; it shouldn't tolerate such errors and shouldn't rely on the author to be an editor, as well.