Extreme Survivors: 60 Epic Stories of Human Endurance

by Collins Maps, Bear Grylls (Foreword)

The statistics, descriptions, and illustrative maps fully describe of 60 of the world's greatest survival stories. Find out how Joe Simpson crawled to safety in the South American Andean mountains; how Anthony Farrar-Hockley evaded capture after the Battle of Imjin River in the Korean War; how Shackleton’s men survived the incredible journey by boat to South Georgia; and how Naheeda Bi survived 10 years in captivity after her notorious tribal kidnapping in Pakistan.

Genres: Nonfiction

304 pages, Paperback

Published October 1, 2019

About the author

Collins has been a leading publisher of maps and atlases for almost 200 years.

Reviews

[Starfast]

Content is interesting enough, but the writing leaves a lot to be desired. Whoever edited this needs to be fired or something because I spotted a couple spelling errors (pg. 216 "Farrrar-Hockley" and pg. 284 "Zateyez.") There's also a part on pg 332 with the line "When he refused, one of the men put the muzzle of a 9mm pistol in his mouth and said:" Whatever he says apparently never made it into the book, so I guess we'll never know ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

[John Winkelman]

I liked this book a lot, but it’s not 5-star good. A different Goodreads review for the same book incorrectly lists Bear Grylls as the author. He only wrote the forward, and it was my least favorite part of the book. The remaining 60 stories were the kind of tales I’ve read as whole books about or watched in epic movies: Think of, The Great Escape, Captain Phillips, Escape from Alcatraz, Moby Dick, Apollo 13, Endurance, etc. Each story includes maps that depict the epic journeys.

[Kat]

3* for the content, 1* (or less) for the production. Dodgy spelling, dodgy maps, missing info (one sentence starts but never finishes) and generally shonky or non-existent editing. A lot of the stories I had read the actual book about, which was cool, and now I have some more to find out about.

[Ian Mccausland]

Bought in the airport enroute to a hot holiday. Good mindless read for the beach

[Doug I]

This is not a good book.

It has no author. It has many editing errors.

Certain stories are exciting by their nature, but not necessarily well written.

[Emy]

Absolutely loved this! I was wanting to read about survival stories and that book definitely filled that need.