Felipe Fernandez-Armesto

Navigator of the North

Bering: The Russian Discovery of America

By

Yale University Press 330pp £19.95 order from our bookshop

PUBLICATION BY YALE University Press has become a guarantee of literary merit as well as scholarly excellence. Orcutt Frost’s scholarship is irreproachable. But how does work so judicious, so scrupulous, so reticent, so resistant to sensation and artifice, contrive to be so gripping? This is the formula historians crave: a rattling read, without sacrifice of academic austerity.

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