The lonely iceman celebrated in David Roberts’s new book is Australian explorer Douglas Mawson, who in January 1913 performed the kind of feats today associated with Cirque du Soleil: contortions while dangling at the end of a rope. But while the Cirque jocks train their bodies incessantly and practice each move repeatedly before putting it on display, Mawson reached his moment of truth unawares. After he fell partway into an Antarctic crevasse, his task was not to play Tarzan in the most audience-pleasing way (in fact, he was separated from the nearest human being by hundreds of miles) but to save his own life.

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