Download or read book 127 Hours written by Aron Ralston and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2011-02-03 with total page 450 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A day-by-day account of Aron Ralston's unforgettable survival story. On Saturday, 26 April 2003, Aron Ralston, a 27-year-old outdoorsman and adventurer, set off for a day's hike in the Utah canyons. Eight miles from his truck, he found himself in the middle of a deep and remote canyon. Then the unthinkable happened: a boulder shifted and snared his right arm against the canyon wall. He was trapped, facing dehydration, starvation, hallucinations and hypothermia as night-time temperatures plummeted. Five and a half days later, Aron Ralston finally came to the agonising conclusion that his only hope was to amputate his own arm and get himself to safety. Miraculously, he survived. 127 Hours is more than just an adventure story. It is a brave, honest and above all inspiring account of one man's valiant effort to survive, and is destined to take its place among adventure classics such as Touching the Void.
Download or read book Summary of Aron Ralston s Between a Rock and a Hard Place written by Everest Media, and published by Everest Media LLC. This book was released on 2022-04-23T22:59:00Z with total page 58 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Please note: This is a companion version & not the original book. Sample Book Insights: #1 I was mountain biking by myself in the far southeastern corner of Emery County, in central-eastern Utah, on April 26, 2003. I had twenty-five pounds of supplies and equipment on my bike ride, which was difficult to move forward due to the wind. #2 Lightweight travel is a pleasure to me, and I’ve figured out how to do more with less so I can go farther in a given amount of time. I biked the twelve-mile loop of the Slick Rock Trail over east of Moab yesterday, carrying only six pounds of water and camera equipment. #3 I am planning on riding the White Rim Trail in Canyonlands National Park, a 108-mile route that takes about twenty-four hours to complete. I am hoping to carry fifteen pounds and complete the loop in under twenty-four hours. #4 I had the impression that I was watching the ongoing birth of a landscape, as if I were standing on the rim of an exploding caldera. The vista made me realize how scarce and delicate life is, how insignificant we are compared to the forces of nature and the dimensions of space.
Download or read book No Shortcuts to the Top written by Ed Viesturs and published by Crown. This book was released on 2006-10-17 with total page 378 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: NATIONAL BESTSELLER • This gripping and triumphant memoir from the author of The Mountain follows a living legend of extreme mountaineering as he makes his assault on history, one 8,000-meter summit at a time. “From the drama of the peaks, to the struggle of making a living as a professional climber, to the basic how-tos of life at 26,000 feet, No Shortcuts to the Top is fascinating reading.”—Aron Ralston, author of Between a Rock and a Hard Place and subject of the film 127 Hours For eighteen years Ed Viesturs pursued climbing’s holy grail: to stand atop the world’s fourteen 8,000-meter peaks, without the aid of bottled oxygen. But No Shortcuts to the Top is as much about the man who would become the first American to achieve that goal as it is about his stunning quest. As Viesturs recounts the stories of his most harrowing climbs, he reveals a man torn between the flat, safe world he and his loved ones share and the majestic and deadly places where only he can go. A preternaturally cautious climber who once turned back 300 feet from the top of Everest but who would not shrink from a peak (Annapurna) known to claim the life of one climber for every two who reached its summit, Viesturs lives by an unyielding motto, “Reaching the summit is optional. Getting down is mandatory.” It is with this philosophy that he vividly describes fatal errors in judgment made by his fellow climbers as well as a few of his own close calls and gallant rescues. And, for the first time, he details his own pivotal and heroic role in the 1996 Everest disaster made famous in Jon Krakauer’s Into Thin Air. In addition to the raw excitement of Viesturs’s odyssey, No Shortcuts to the Top is leavened with many funny moments revealing the camaraderie between climbers. It is more than the first full account of one of the staggering accomplishments of our time; it is a portrait of a brave and devoted family man and his beliefs that shaped this most perilous and magnificent pursuit.
Download or read book Beyond the Sky and the Earth written by Jamie Zeppa and published by Doubleday Canada. This book was released on 2011-01-28 with total page 307 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the tradition of Iron and Silk and Touch the Dragon, Jamie Zeppa’s memoir of her years in Bhutan is the story of a young woman’s self-discovery in a foreign land. It is also the exciting début of a new voice in travel writing. When she left for the Himalayan kingdom of Bhutan in 1988, Zeppa was committing herself to two years of teaching and a daunting new experience. A week on a Caribbean beach had been her only previous trip outside Canada; Bhutan was on the other side of the world, one of the most isolated countries in the world known as the last Shangri-La, where little had changed in centuries and visits by foreigners were restricted. Clinging to her bags full of chocolate, hair conditioner and Immodium, she began the biggest challenge of her life, with no idea she would fall in love with the country and with a Bhutanese man, end up spending nine years in Bhutan, and begin a literary career with her account of this transformative journey. At her first posting in a remote village of eastern Bhutan, she is plunged into an overwhelmingly different culture with squalid Third World conditions and an impossible language. Her house has rats and fleas and she refuses to eat the local food, fearing the rampant deadly infections her overly protective grandfather warned her about. Gradually, however, her fear vanishes. She adjusts, begins to laugh, and is captivated by the pristine mountain scenery and the kind students in her grade 2 class. She also begins to discover for herself the spiritual serenity of Buddhism. A transfer to the government college of Sherubtse, where the housing conditions are comparatively luxurious and the students closer to her own age, gives her a deeper awareness of Bhutan’s challenges: the lack of personal privacy, the pressure to conform, and the political tensions. However, her connection to Bhutan intensifies when she falls in love with a student, Tshewang, and finds herself pregnant. After a brief sojourn in Canada to give birth to her son, Pema Dorji, she marries Tshewang and makes Bhutan her home for another four years. Zeppa’s personal essay about her culture shock on arriving in Bhutan won the 1996 CBC/Saturday Night literary competition and appeared in the magazine. She flew home to accept the prize, where people encouraged her to pursue her writing. Her letters from Bhutan also featured on CBC’s Morningside. The book that grew out of this has been published in Canada and the United States to ecstatic reviews, followed by British, German, Dutch, Italian and Spanish editions. Although cultural differences finally separated Jamie and Tshewang in 1997 while she was writing the book and she returned to Canada, she will always feel at home in Bhutan. Zeppa shares her compelling insights into this land and culture, but Beyond the Sky and the Earth is more than a travel book. With rich, spellbinding prose and bright humour, it describes a personal journey in which Zeppa acquires a deeper understanding of what it means to leave one’s home behind, and undergoes a spiritual transformation.
Download or read book Death Grip written by Matt Samet and published by St. Martin's Press. This book was released on 2013-02-12 with total page 287 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Death Grip chronicles a top climber's near-fatal struggle with anxiety and depression, and his nightmarish journey through the dangerous world of prescription drugs. Matt Samet lived to climb, and craved the challenge, risk, and exhilaration of conquering sheer rock faces around the United States and internationally. But Samet's depression, compounded by the extreme diet and fitness practices of climbers, led him to seek professional help. He entered the murky, inescapable world of psychiatric medicine, where he developed a dangerous addiction to prescribed medications—primarily "benzos," or benzodiazepines—that landed him in institutions and nearly killed him. With dramatic storytelling, persuasive research data, and searing honesty, Matt Samet reveals the hidden epidemic of benzo addiction, which some have suggested can be harder to quit than heroin. Millions of adults and teenagers are prescribed these drugs, but few understand how addictive they are—and how dangerous long-term usage can be, even when prescribed by doctors. After a difficult struggle with addiction, Samet slowly makes his way to a life in recovery through perseverance and a deep love of rock climbing. Conveying both the exhilaration of climbing in the wilderness and the utter madness of addiction, Death Grip is a powerful and revelatory memoir.
Download or read book The Last Season written by Eric Blehm and published by Harper Collins. This book was released on 2009-10-13 with total page 434 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "As Jon Krakauer did with Into the Wild, Blehm turns a missing-man riddle into an insightful meditation on wilderness and the personal demons and angels that propel us into it alone.” — Outside magazine Destined to become a classic of adventure literature, The Last Season examines the extraordinary life of legendary backcountry ranger Randy Morgenson and his mysterious disappearance in California's unforgiving Sierra Nevada—mountains as perilous as they are beautiful. Eric Blehm's masterful work is a gripping detective story interwoven with the riveting biography of a complicated, original, and wholly fascinating man.
Download or read book When I Fell From the Sky written by Juliane Koepcke and published by Hachette UK. This book was released on 2012-03-22 with total page 254 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: On Christmas Eve 1971, the packed LANSA flight 508 from Lima to Pucallpa was struck by lightning and went down in dense jungle hundreds of miles from civilization. Of its 93 passengers, only one survived. Juliane Koepcke, the seventeen-year-old child of famous German zoologists. She'd been thrown from the plane two miles above the forest canopy, but had sustained only a broken collarbone and a cut on her leg. With incredible courage, instinct and ingenuity, she survived three weeks in the "green hell" of the Amazon - using the skills she'd learned in assisting her parents on their research trips into the jungle - before coming across a loggers hut, and, with it, safety. Now she tells her fascinating story for the first time, and in doing so tells us about her 'Gerald Durrell' childhood - with a menagerie of wild, exotic and sometimes dangerous pets - about how she learned to survive at her parents ecological station deep in the rainforest and about her present-day commitment to this wildlife as a biologist and dedicated environmentalist.
Download or read book Miracle in the Andes written by Nando Parrado and published by Crown. This book was released on 2007-05-15 with total page 338 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • A harrowing, moving memoir of the 1972 plane crash that left its survivors stranded on a glacier in the Andes—and one man’s quest to lead them all home—now in a special edition for 2022, commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of the crash, featuring a new introduction by the author “In straightforward, staggeringly honest prose, Nando Parrado tells us what it took—and what it actually felt like—to survive high in the Andes for seventy-two days after having been given up for dead.”—Jon Krakauer, author of Into the Wild “In the first hours there was nothing, no fear or sadness, just a black and perfect silence.” Nando Parrado was unconscious for three days before he woke to discover that the plane carrying his rugby team to Chile had crashed deep in the Andes, killing many of his teammates, his mother, and his sister. Stranded with the few remaining survivors on a lifeless glacier and thinking constantly of his father’s grief, Parrado resolved that he could not simply wait to die. So Parrado, an ordinary young man with no particular disposition for leadership or heroism, led an expedition up the treacherous slopes of a snowcapped mountain and across forty-five miles of frozen wilderness in an attempt to save his friends’ lives as well as his own. Decades after the disaster, Parrado tells his story with remarkable candor and depth of feeling. Miracle in the Andes, a first-person account of the crash and its aftermath, is more than a riveting tale of true-life adventure; it is a revealing look at life at the edge of death and a meditation on the limitless redemptive power of love.
Download or read book The Explorer s Daughter written by Kari Herbert and published by . This book was released on 2004 with total page 384 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For the first two years of her life Kari Herbert lived with her mother and father, the explorer Sir Wally Herbert, among the Inuit people in the vast snowy wastes of the High Arctic. Her first words were Inuktun, her first friends the children of hunters and the pull of the place and its people lured the family back several times during her childhood. Then in 2002 she returned to the Arctic alone. She met her childhood friends again, remembered the exhilaration of sledging with dogs across the ice and remembered the language and faces of her early years. She also encountered alarming changes: the uneasy coexistence of modern life and ancient traditions, and of the hopes and tragedy at the heart of this extraordinary and yet deeply familiar community. place of family memories and of savage beauty, where her friends still hunt and eat whale meat; and where she rediscovers a compelling world where light and darkness dominate life.
Download or read book Delta Of Venus written by Anaïs Nin and published by HarperCollins. This book was released on 2004-02-02 with total page 307 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From influential feminist artist and essayist Anais Nin, Delta of Venus is one of the most important works of modern female erotica and "a joyous display of the erotic imagination" (The New York Times Book Review). Anais Nin pens a lush, magical world where the characters of her imagination possess the most universal of desires and exceptional of talents. Among these provocative stories, a Hungarian adventurer seduces wealthy women then vanishes with their money; a veiled woman selects strangers from a chic restaurant for private trysts; and a Parisian hatmaker named Mathilde leaves her husband for the opium dens of Peru. This is an extraordinarily rich and exotic collection from a master of erotic writing. "Inventive, sophisticated . . . highly elegant naughtiness."—Cosmopolitan
Download or read book The Microeconomic Mode written by Jane K. Elliott and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2018-06-26 with total page 231 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From The Road to Game of Thrones, across works as seemingly different as Gone Girl and Saw, literature, film, and television have become obsessed with the intersection of survival and choice. When the trapped rock-climber hero of 127 Hours is confronted with self-amputation or death, it is only a particularly blunt example of an omnipresent set-up. In real-life settings or fantastical games, protagonists find themselves confronting extreme scenarios with life-or-death consequences, forced to make torturous either-or choices in stripped-down, brutally stark environments. Jane Elliott identifies and analyzes this new and distinctive aesthetic phenomenon, which she calls “the microeconomic mode.” Through close readings of its narratives, tropes, and concepts, she traces the implicit theoretical and political claims conveyed by this combination of abstraction and extremity. In the microeconomic mode, humans isolated from any forms of social organization operate within a mini-economy of costs and benefits, gains and losses, measured in the currency of life. Elliott reads the key concepts that emerge from this aesthetic—life-interest, sovereign capture, and binary life—in relation to biopolitics and natural law theory, becoming and the control society, and primitive accumulation in racial capitalism. The microeconomic mode interrogates the destruction of the liberal political subject, but what it leaves in its place is as disturbing as it is radically new. Going beyond the question of neoliberalism in literature, The Microeconomic Mode combines revelatory close readings of key literary and popular texts with significant theoretical interventions to identify how an aesthetics of choice has reshaped our contemporary understanding of what it means to be human.
Download or read book Bobcat and Other Stories written by Rebecca Lee and published by Text Publishing. This book was released on 2014-06-25 with total page 223 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the 2013 Believer Book Award. At turns heartbreaking and wise, tender and wry Bobcat and Other Stories establishes Rebecca Lee as one of the most powerful and original voices in contemporary fiction. A university student on her summer abroad is offered the unusual task of arranging a friend's marriage. Secret infidelities and one guest's dubious bobcat-related injury propel a Manhattan dinner party to its unexpected conclusion. Students at an elite architecture retreat seek the wisdom of their revered mentor but end up learning more about themselves and one another than about their shared craft. In these acutely observed and scaldingly honest stories Lee gives us characters who are complex and flawed, cracking open their fragile beliefs and exposing the paradoxes that lie within their romantic and intellectual pursuits. Whether they're in the countryside of the American Midwest, on a dusty prairie road in Saskatchewan, or among the skyscrapers and voluptuous hills of Hong Kong, the terrain is never as difficult to navigate as their own histories and desires. Rebecca Lee is the author of the critically acclaimed novel The City Is a Rising Tide and the short story collection Bobcat and Other Stories. She has been published in The Atlantic and Zoetrope, and in 2001 she received a National Magazine Award for her short fiction. Originally from Saskatchewan, Lee is a graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop and is now a professor of creative writing at the University of North Carolina at Wilmington. 'Bobcat and Other Stories is nothing short of brilliant. Rebecca Lee writes with the unflinching, cumulatively devastating precision of Chekhov and Munro, peeling back layer after layer of illusion until we're left with the truth of ourselves ...This extraordinary story collection is sure to confirm its author as one of the best writers of her generation.' Ben Fountain, author of Billy Flynn's Long Halftime Walk 'Mesmirisingly strange...[Lee's] eccentric eloquence...makes Bobcat so potent and powerful.' New York Times 'In all these stories, confused, sometimes misdirected men and women struggle to figure out their places in the world, stumble into often unhappy situations and sometimes, to their great misfortune, get exactly what they were hoping for...Lee captures little pieces of all of us and she does it in language so delicate and precise that you'll re-read passages for the joy of it.' Star Tribune 'Slim, sly and brilliant.' Oprah.com 'Lee writes with an unflinching eye toward the darkest and saddest aspects of life, often finding humor where least expected. This fresh, provocative collection, peerless in its vehement elucidation of contemporary foibles, is not to be missed.' Publisher's Weekly 'This is a potent, quietly daring and sturdily imagined collection, rich with a subtlety in short supply in our current short-fiction landscape, where writers seem to settle for lobbing verbal grenades in the reader's general direction. In stories like "Bobcat" and "Fialta," there is the real sense of significance, as though a whole subway system's worth of meaning is roaring beneath the text, ready to whisk the reader anywhere they need to go.' National Post
Download or read book Death Clouds on Mount Baldy written by Cathy Hufault and published by . This book was released on 2010-09-15 with total page 290 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Nov. 15, 1958. An arctic-like blizzard roars out of nowhere across the mild desert terrain of southern Arizona. Boy scouts are feared caught out in the open, perhaps buried under the three to seven feet of snowfall in the mountains. Cowboys urge their horses through the chest high snow, hikers push through monster snowdrifts, and helicopters hover at dangerous altitudes in their struggle to find the boys before they die.
Download or read book Born to Run written by Christopher McDougall and published by Profile Books. This book was released on 2010-12-09 with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A New York Times bestseller 'A sensation ... a rollicking tale well told' - The Times At the heart of Born to Run lies a mysterious tribe of Mexican Indians, the Tarahumara, who live quietly in canyons and are reputed to be the best distance runners in the world; in 1993, one of them, aged 57, came first in a prestigious 100-mile race wearing a toga and sandals. A small group of the world's top ultra-runners (and the awe-inspiring author) make the treacherous journey into the canyons to try to learn the tribe's secrets and then take them on over a course 50 miles long. With incredible energy and smart observation, McDougall tells this story while asking what the secrets are to being an incredible runner. Travelling to labs at Harvard, Nike, and elsewhere, he comes across an incredible cast of characters, including the woman who recently broke the world record for 100 miles and for her encore ran a 2:50 marathon in a bikini, pausing to down a beer at the 20 mile mark.
Download or read book Keeping Family and Friends in God s Hands written by Nykia Coleman and published by Xulon Press. This book was released on 2008-02 with total page 76 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Includes personal testimonies and poetic prayers on how to keep family and friends in God's hands. Every reader will be inspired not to give up on the promises of God.
Download or read book Transcendent Summits written by Gerry Roach and published by Fulcrum Publishing. This book was released on 2004 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In his reflective autobiography, Gerry Roach takes us back to his roots to rediscover a lifelong passion for climbing. This candid memoir reveals an often amusing ascent from a young boy's ambition to Denali, the first step in his quest for the Seven Summits. Join Gerry and his Summit Club as they enjoy the view from the top of North America's most famous peaks and a few places that are likely to surprise you.
Download or read book The Mythical Man month written by Frederick P. Brooks (Jr.) and published by Reading, Mass. ; Don Mills, Ont. : Addison-Wesley Publishing Company. This book was released on 1975 with total page 216 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The orderly Sweet-Williams are dismayed at their son's fondness for the messy pastime of gardening.
