In 1805, Bostonian Frederic Tudor decided that he would make his fortune shipping ice to the tropics; a plan his peers dismissed as ridiculous. Despite the many setbacks he encountered, Tudor refused to give up, and with more than dogged perseverance, he established markets in cities all over the world, from Charleston and New Orleans to Havana and even Calcutta. The biography chronicles Frederic's business adventures in colorful detail, but the authors also give us much more. They capture the dynamics of what was, in modern parlance, a dysfunctional family, rife with petty misunderstandings and persistent grudges; the Tudor whims and squabbles, played out on a global scale.