We’re fascinated by people who choose to engage in dangerous and extreme activities in the world’s toughest environments. These intrepid individuals face extraordinary physical, psychological and interpersonal demands – in polar and desert regions, atop mountains, in space, in the sky, on the oceans, or under water.
What is it really like to live, work, and play in the world’s harshest places, and what sorts of people do those environments attract? Here are 10 of our favourite books about and by people in extremes.
- The Worst Journey in the World by Apsley Cherry-Garrard (Vintage, 2010; first published 1922)
The “worst journey” was not Captain Scott’s final, doomed trek to the South Pole in 1912 but an astonishing feat of endurance by members of his expedition the previous winter. Cherry-Garrard and two companions dragged heavy sledges across Antarctica for five weeks in darkness, dodging crevasses, and in temperatures so cold their teeth cracked – all to collect penguin eggs. Cherry-Garrard’s harrowing account is rightly described as the greatest ever account of extreme adventure. - Blind Descent: The Quest to Discover the Deepest Place on Earth by James Tabor (Random House, 2003)
If you know nothing about exploring the world’s deepest, longest caves then Tabor’s tale will inform, entertain, and terrify you. Blind Descent introduces us to the men and women who engage in an activity that is arguably more dangerous and difficult than climbing Everest. Learn how they overcome physical threats that include asphyxiation, hypothermia, premature burial – and rabid bats – along with psychological hazards such as claustrophobia, anxiety, hallucinations, and the terror of being hopelessly lost underground. - Arabian Sands by Wilfred Thesiger (Penguin Classics, 2007; first published 1959)
Wilfrend Thesiger during the second crossing of the Empty Quarter, Oman 1948. © Pitt Rivers Museum
Ex-SAS man Thesiger took to the deserts of the Arabian Peninsula after the second world war. Travelling with Bedouin Arabs across the vast, remote, and deadly Empty Quarter, he battled heat and cold, hunger and thirst, fear and boredom. “But more wearing still is the nervous tension,” he wrote. “I was to learn how hard it is to live crowded together with people … in the solitude of the desert, how easy to be provoked to senseless wrath by the importunities and improvidence.”
- Magnificent Failure: Free Fall from the Edge of Space by Craig Ryan (Smithsonian Institution Press, 2003)
Five decades before Felix Baumgartner and Alan Eustace broke records for the highest freefall, Nick Piantanida made three attempts at a stratospheric jump from a capsule beneath a helium-filled balloon. As a civilian he could not access US Air Force resources, so he became a “one-man research programme”, sourcing materials, designing the capsule, and developing a training regime. On his final attempt he accidentally depressurised his helmet during his ascent. The sudden pressure drop caused gas bubbles to form in his body, resulting in fatal brain damage. Ryan presents a captivating account of an intelligent, courageous, determined and capable man. - Neutral Buoyancy by Tim Ecott (Penguin, 2002)
The Deep exhibition at the Naural History Museum in London. Photograph: Photograph: Graham Turner/Guardian
Ecott’s personal exploration leads us through the history of diving, featuring those obsessed with underwater worlds and describing the perils they face. John Day, for instance, laboured for months constructing a wooden “submarine” in which he intended to live on the seabed. He and his new home were released into Plymouth Sound in 1774 and never seen again. “Few men can have worked so long and so hard on constructing their own coffin,” observes Ecott. - Regions of the Heart by David Rose and Ed Douglas (2000)
When the British climber Alison Hargreaves died on K2 in 1995 many commentators erupted with moral outrage, attacking her decision to climb such a dangerous mountain when she had two small children at home. This honest but sympathetic biography shows that the ascent of K2 was no vainglorious expedition. Hargreaves was a professional mountaineer and the family breadwinner, and was climbing to secure her children’s future. Nor was she reckless: she was a talented climber who had made numerous first ascents. Rose and Douglas help us understand the complex reality behind the headlines. - The Strange Last Voyage of Donald Crowhurst by Nicholas Tomalin and Ron Hall (Hodder & Stoughton, 2003)
In 1968 Crowhurst entered a non-stop, solo round-the-world yacht race. He had neither the boat nor the skills to tackle such a journey, but he’d staked his home, his business, and his pride on winning. Crowhurst appeared to make remarkable progress, but in reality never left the Atlantic. His logs recorded both his fabricated readings and his descent into psychosis. Eight months after departure, his empty boat was found drifting. Tomalin and Hall’s sympathetic account traces the events leading up to Crowhurst’s suicide. - The Wave: In Pursuit of the Oceans’ Greatest Furies by Susan Casey (Vintage, 2011)
Susan Casey’s bestselling account of big waves and the people who chase them is a captivating read. Experienced big-wave surfers reveal their greatest fear might not be dying but “being pounded so bad that psychologically you don’t recover”. Oceanographers on a grim scientific voyage to Iceland knew what that felt like: they spent a week being pummelled by a storm so violent that equipment was catapulted around their on-board labs and windows shattered, and where the ship hovered on the crests of 80ft waves “before crashing … into this enormous hole in the sea below”. - Touching the Void by Joe Simpson (Vintage, 1997)
Simpson’s account of how he dragged himself to safety after being left for dead in a crevasse in the Andes has justly become a mountaineering classic. A powerful story of survival in extremes, conveying with brutal honesty the physical and psychological horrors of three days spent in appalling pain, dehydrated and hungry, and haunted by the thought that he would find base camp abandoned. It’s a harrowing tale, although Simpson noted that “for me this book still falls short of articulating just how dreadful were some of those lonely days. I simply could not find the words to express the utter desolation of the experience.” - An Astronaut’s Guide to Life on Earth by Chris Hadfield (Macmillan, 2013)
‘Try to be nice’ ... Expedition 34 Flight Engineer Chris Hadfield with floating tomatoes on the International Space Station in 2013. NASA/REX
Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield does a fine job of applying the lessons of space to everyday life on earth. Work hard, value learning, remember that the journey is worthwhile even if the destination seems unattainable, and keep things in proportion. And try to be nice. As Hadfield points out, “no one wants to go into space with a jerk”. Sound advice, indeed.
• Dr Emma Barrett and Dr Paul Martin are the authors of Extreme: Why Some People Thrive at the Limits, published by Oxford University Press. Paul is the author of several science books including The Sickening Mind, Counting Sheep, and Making Happy People. Emma is Honorary Researcher in Psychology at Lancaster University
