The Greatest Survival Stories Ever Told

This book is an excellent anthology of survival and adventure stories, both true and fictional, edited by Lamar Underwood, who is himself a noted woodsman and is a former senior editor of Outdoor Life Magazine. The book features seventeen selections, each of which is preceded by an informative introductory paragraph by Underwood. Ten of the selections are nonfiction. The true stories include excerpts from Alan Moorhead's Cooper's Creek (a Sophocles or a Shakespeare could not have come up with a more tragic series of coincidences than those which defeated the Burke and Wills Expedition in the Australian outback in 1861), Diana Preston's A First-Rate Tragedy (Robert Falcon Scott's unsuccessful and fatal race to the South Pole), Jon Krakauer's Eiger Dreams, Ernest Shackleton's South, Piers Paul Reed's Alive, and Maurice Herzog's Annapurna. In addition to those famous true stories are lesser known true stories of a trek by a group of escaped prisoners from Siberia to India, stories of the trappers, explorers and mountain men of the American wilderness, and the story of the Whaleship Essex (the true account which inspired Herman Melville to write Moby Dick). For those who wish to read further, Underwood provides citations to the original works. The fiction selections are time-honored classic adventure stories - Carl Stephenson's incomparable Leiningen versus the Ants, Richard Connell's The Most Dangerous Game, Jack London's To Build a Fire, Farley Mowfat's Walk Well My Brother, Stephen Crane's The Open Boat and George Toudouze's Three Skeleton Key. For the survival story aficionado, the value of this book is that the most exciting excerpts of the very best true accounts are all in one place. The fictional stories are exceedingly familiar (and often anthologized) but will most certainly be appreciated by the younger members of the household who may not have encountered these classics yet. I ended up reading this book twice - the first time was years ago, the second time was more recently reading the book aloud to my son. Once he'd heard Leiningen versus the Ants, he had to hear the rest of the stories. Be aware that the title of the book is somewhat misleading - in some of the selections there are no survivors.

The title of my review is a quote from Daniel Webster. This collection of stories, both fiction and nonfiction, includes some of the best adventure writing ever. The fictional stories include "Leiningen Versus the Ants" by Carl Stephenson (the basis for the movie "The Naked Jungle") as well as "Rikki-Tikki-Tavi" by Rudyard Kipling. The nonfiction stories include "The Long Walk" by Slavomir Rawicz and "Alive" by Piers Paul Read (the basis for movie with the same title). This is the perfect book to curl up with next to a roaring fire.