David Grann: The White Darkness

David Grann

The best narrative-nonfiction journalists spin long historical lines out of intimate human stories in prose that relies on crafty structure, not the rhetorical hard sell, for emotion and suspense. This is why David Grann is one of the very best. He plays his cards close to the vest, bringing the reader into not just his conclusions, but also his process of discovery. His careful reportage page-turns like potboilers in book-length lives-and-times portraits of people who strode through history powered by courage, obsession, and madness. The Lost City of Z is a cracking adventure yarn that also vividly details the waning days of British exploration, while Killers of the Flower Moon is a gripping murder mystery that also illuminates the U.S.’s colonial atrocities and chronicles the emergence of the FBI. Grann’s new book, The White Darkness, previously excerpted in The New Yorker, follows contemporary Antarctic explorers who are trying to complete the legendary journey that Ernest Shackleton could not, tying the twentieth and twenty-first centuries in a knot, as Grann likes to do. We’re shivering with anticipation.