The frozen wilderness of the Far North has long tested the most extreme and reckless of adventurers. In Prisoners of the North, Pierre Berton depicts five extraordinary characters who were in thrall to the Artic's forbidding landscapes: a mining tycoon; an explorer; a titled lady; a backwoods eccentric; and a best-selling poet. Their life stories give us a compelling portrait of the Arctic, long before it was tamed by the bush plane, the snowmobile, and the paved highway.