Felipe Fernandez-Armesto
Navigator of the North
Bering: The Russian Discovery of America
By Orcutt Frost
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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