By Sally Leahey

    A couple of weeks ago Dora St. Martin wrote in this column about books with warm settings to help you escape the hardships of Maine     winter.
Here’s another approach: How about embracing the cold with some books that contain all kinds of chill within their pages?
    To realize that we really don’t have it so bad here after all, consider Sir Ernest Henry Shackleton, the polar explorer. In 1914 Shackleton organized an expedition to Antarctica on the ship Endurance.  After being trapped in a frozen sea for nine months, the Endurance finally was crushed. Shackleton and his crew of 27 men were forced to make a frigid and perilous 800-mile journey across ice and stormy seas to reach inhabited land.
    The library has a variety of items about Shackleton.  In the coziness of your home you can read “Shackleton: His Antarctic Writings,” edited by Christopher Ralling; or listen to the audio book on cassette, “Shipwreck at the Bottom of the World” by Jennifer Armstrong.
    If you have a VCR, you can watch the four-part documentary “Shackleton” based on the diaries and first-person accounts of expedition members.
    For a more contemporary view of the South Pole, read or listen to “Ice bound: A Doctor’s Incredible Battle for Survival,” the heartwarming true story of Jerri Nielsen, the doctor who had to treat herself for cancer until she could be rescued from the Amundsen-Scott Station on Antarctica.  Temperatures there get as low as 100 degrees below zero.  
    If your taste runs more toward fiction in general and mysteries in particular, there are many books that are chilling in both temperature and plot.  Some examples are mysteries by Dana Stabenow and Susan Henry.
    Both authors have written series about investigators in Alaska, where the unfriendly climate seems to heighten the sense of community in isolated areas, even in the face of violence.  Stabenow’s investigator, Kate Shugak, must deal with the isolated and frozen tundra, often defying death with her survival skills while she solves crimes of all sorts.
    Sue Henry writes about popular characters Alex Jensen and Jesse Arnold, who are pitted against a variety of criminals and hostile elements, often with the added interest of dog sledding.
    Canadian author Farley Mowat has been writing books about wilderness survival for 60 years, and his book “The Snow Walker” offers many tales in one volume about the Arctic north.  The book, which includes stories of both fact and fiction, describes hardships of the relentless snow, wind and cold, but it also celebrates the beauties of the northern climate and the endurance and courage required to withstand the elements there.
    Another collection of short stories, all true in this case, is “Out on the Deep Blue: Women, Men, and the Oceans They Fish,” edited by Leslie Fields.  It’s wise to be sitting by the woodstove or fireplace when you read about the dangerous work of fishing through the merciless cold of an arctic storm off the coast of Kodiac Island, Alaska.  The description of hypothermia in “Nights of Ice” will stay with you at least until spring.

Sally Leahey is assistant director of McArthur Library.