ALA Booklist (Tue Feb 01 00:00:00 CST 1994)

Paulsen's survival adventure is in the tradition of Jack London: one man and his dog team together against the Arctic wilderness. With everything stripped down to the barest essentials, Paulsen finds elemental connection with a world beyond cities, family, and work. His prose is spare and physical; at its best, it has the fluid simplicity of Hemingway. On the other hand, there is too much reliance on the pattern of menace beneath the surface. Paulsen is always teetering on the edge of a precipice, waiting to be dragged, dropped, crashed, frozen, torn apart, and buried alive. Fortunately, however, he also has a sense of farce, and there's a lot of the Marx Brothers here. As Paulsen makes clear from the start, the Iditarod race is itself an absurd undertaking--to run with a dog team for 1,800 miles through unimaginable cold, winds beyond belief, roaring waters and deadly dreams. What's most moving is his behavior at the end of the race: I didn't want to go in, he says. Armchair travelers will understand. (Reviewed Feb. 15, 1994)

Publishers Weekly (Fri Oct 06 00:00:00 CDT 2023)

Acclaimed children's book author Paulsen offers a gripping account of his experience running the 1180 mile Iditarod dogsled race. (Feb.)