A staff writer for The New Yorker and the author of “The Lost City of Z,” another tale of obsession in the wilderness, Grann had emailed the explorer’s spokeswoman a year earlier, shortly after reading his obituary in a British newspaper and thinking: This could be a fabulous story. Grann’s meeting with his subject’s family and associates was a long time coming.

“Reporters are supposed to be dispassionate, but I think it’s sometimes better when you let yourself feel.” To borrow from the novelist Thomas Pynchon, as “The White Darkness” does, “We all have our Antarctica.” “What are the limitations of the human will in the face of an unconquerable obstacle? We all face that question.” Indeed, one of the many strengths of this stirring piece is that in presenting the specifics of Worsley’s dilemma, Grann illuminates a universal condition. “I wanted to set up the central question of Worsley’s life,” Grann says in describing the experience of composing the first sentences of what would become “The White Darkness,” a 21,000-word account that appeared in The New Yorker last month. He had just spent several wrenching days speaking with the widow, children, friends and comrades of Henry Worsley, a 55-year-old retired British army officer who died while attempting the impossible: a trek on foot, alone and unassisted (he had to pull his provisions on a sled), from one side of Antarctica to the other – a distance of more than 1,000 treacherous miles. It was February 2017, and Grann was walking the streets of London. Every direction he turned he could see ice stretching to the edge of the Earth.” “The man felt like a speck in the frozen nothingness. The lede came to David Grann a year before he would complete his epic story and a year after the events it describes: The grave of Ernest Shackleton in the Antarctic in an undated photo.

The white darkness by david grann