I confess: I was sceptical about this two-volume encyclopaedia from the moment I saw the title. Surely half of it wasn't about the Arctic Circle, the imaginary line at approximately 66°33′N marking the latitude above which the sun does not rise on Midwinter Day and does not set on Midsummer Day. Could the book actually have a mistake in the title? Fortunately – or unfortunately depending on one's perspective – the mistake was not in the title, but rather in the book's basic definitions. For the editor claims that the Arctic Circle is, in fact, all of the region north of that line, an area that most of the experts I have met during 30 years of conducting research about the polar regions call simply ‘the Arctic.’

This begs the question of why the title therefore didn't address the Antarctic Circle, given that its definition is much the same as for that line in the north. And when I write much the same, I mean it, as the entry for the Antarctic Circle (page 28) states: ‘The 66.5° S latitude is considered the southernmost boundary of the Antarctic Circle.’ I don't know if this was cut and pasted from the Arctic Circle entry, but clearly the Antarctic is not normally defined as the area north of the Antarctic Circle!

There are numerous perplexing questions about this encyclopaedia. First and foremost is: where in the list of contributors are most of the world-respected polar experts? Certainly there are some extremely distinguished scientists, including Marthán Bester, John Cooper, Lawrence Duffy, and Valery Lukin. But, to look at the area I know best, the history entries seem to have avoided the major names in the polar world, such as William Barr, Tim Baughman, Susan Barr, Alan Gurney, Roland Huntford, Bob Bryce, Ian R. Stone, Ann Savours, Max Jones, or Erki Tammiksaar. Instead, a physicist wrote the entries for the Discovery Expedition and the Scottish National Antarctic Expedition; the editor, a medical sociologist, wrote the entries for the Heroic Age of Antarctic Exploration and Ernest Shackleton; and a maritime historian with virtually no publishing background in the Antarctic wrote the entries for the Australasian Antarctic Expedition, the Nimrod Expedition, the Ross Sea Party, and Grytviken.

Equally mystifying is the selection of entries. There is, for example, an entry for Shackleton but not Robert Falcon Scott or Douglas Mawson, for Roald Amundsen but not Fridtjof Nansen, for James Clark Ross but not John Franklin, and for Bob Bartlett but not John King Davis. And although there are entries on the Alfred Wegener Institute, the Norsk Polarinstitutt and the Netherlands’ Dirck Gerritsz Laboratory, there are no entries for the Scott Polar Research Institute, the British Antarctic Survey, or the Australian Antarctic Division.

Where the encyclopaedia does hit its stride is in its coverage of native Arctic peoples – for which the editor wrote about half the entries – and the wildlife of both regions. It also has a number of unusual and interesting topics, such as Dinosaurs of Antarctica, Drifting Research Stations in the Arctic Ocean, Ice Worms, and the Lena Massacre of 1912.

But I am no expert in these areas, so I cannot speak to the accuracy of the entries. However, the entries for topics with which I am familiar contain numerous factual errors. For example: that the Northeast Passage was ‘not successfully crossed until the early twentieth century’ (page xvii) ignores Adolf Erik Nordenskiöld's first navigation of it in Vega (1878–80); Amundsen's measurements during his navigation of the Northwest Passage did not confirm ‘the location established by James Clark Ross’ for the North Magnetic Pole (page 23), but rather showed that the Pole had, in fact, moved north of where it had been in 1831; the British Antarctic Survey was not established in 1962 (page 48), but was simply renamed from the Falkland Islands Dependencies Survey; and the Australasian Antarctic Expedition was not ‘mainly financed by the Australian Association for the Advancement of Sciences’ (page 122), as the AAAS donated £1000, which was less than the Commonwealth government, three separate Australian states, the British government, and three private individuals. Moreover, Bob Bartlett did not sail Roosevelt north of 88° on Peary's final expedition (page 130), but was part of the sledging operation with dogs that took him to 87°48′N before he was ordered by Peary back to the ship, which was at Cape Sheridan on the northeast tip of Ellesmere Island; James Cook did not grow up in Scotland (page 205), but in Yorkshire; the Argentine occupation of South Georgia did not ‘end after a couple of days with the recapture of Grytviken’ (page 325), but lasted until the island was retaken on 25 April, more than three weeks after Argentine troops moved in; the British Antarctic Expedition's Southern Party did not comprise just Shackleton, Frank Wild, and Eric Marshall (page 336), but also included Jameson Adams; Shackleton's farthest south was not ‘just under 100 miles (160 km) shy of the South Pole’ (page 336), because the 97 geographical miles from the Pole were equivalent to 112 statute miles or about 180 km; and Mawson was not the first to explore the Shackleton Ice Shelf (page 373) because it was actually explored by the members of his Western Base under Frank Wild.

These errors – and numerous others that I found – give me concerns about the accuracy of all the entries. Thus, although it is a handsomely produced and bound book, it is not one that I feel I could confidently use as an authoritative source.