To THE ARCTIC! (334 pp.)Jeanneffe MirskyKnopf ($5).
When the northbound traveler invades the six million square miles of the Arctic Circle, he soon leaves the great timberlands behind and enters a region where the last, sparse outposts of birch, spruce and cottonwood gradually fade into the boundless levels of the tundra. Here is the world which "knows but two seasons: winter and August"; here great rivers of North America and Asia drain away and congeal into the titanic ice-blocks of the Arctic Ocean; here (and not at the North Pole) the thermometer has touched...