THE HAUNTED JOURNEY

This abridgement of Murphy's 1961 log of Vitus Bering's expeditions for Peter the Great to discover the coast of America is not appreciably shorter than the original but dispenses with specialized or in-appropriate-for-this-audience extraneities: navigational jargon, politico-historical details, time-date-latitude notations, physiological traumata, and encounters with strange moralities; the verbiage (awkward occasionally in both editions) is reduced also to good effect. It's a real live survival story (in which many men didn't) of a maverick crew whose moods and motives clashed bitterly and whose commander was a victim of fate and scurvy--the former leading to errors, the latter causing his death. When it isn't tedious because of the unvarying form, this close account is awesome, likely to haunt those who explore the reportage of sixteen years of journeying.