The editor of The New York Times Book Review, guessing that people might be keen to read about somewhere other than America for just a moment, offered them two possible options at the weekend. In her email to regular readers, Pamela Paul mentioned that the cover featured two very different books:

The first, “Icebound: Shipwrecked at the Edge of the World,” by Andrea Pitzer, offers a historical Arctic adventure about the Dutch explorer William Barents (namesake of the Barents Sea). The second, “Himalaya: A Human History,” by Ed Douglas, is a social, cultural and geological portrait of the mountain range separating the Indian subcontinent from the rest of Asia, shaping the populations, economies, politics and landscape of the region.