Bernard Stonehouse and John Snyder are longstanding partners in polar tourism research. This is not the first contribution by these authors and I am sure it will not be the last. They have spent a lot of time at both ends of the earth, and this comes across in their new book. It is not long or complicated; it simply describes how things actually work in Arctic and Antarctic regions. They provide a valuable context for current tourism by outlining the history, patterns and trends in other human uses of these areas, from early exploration to modern research stations, military history to mining, and some of the politics of Indigenous habitation past and present.