Travel

Travel, Adventure, and Survival Books
Reviewed by Ms. Belben
Updated January 2007

In July, 1945, shortly before the Japanese surrender ended World War II, the United States suffered its worst wartime naval disaster ever when the U.S.S. Indianapolis was torpedoed in the Pacific Ocean, killing 880 men.

Hundreds of men perished in the initial blast, but still hundreds more were left in the water to die from their injuries, from drowning, from dehydration and exhaustion, and worst of all, from the attacks of hundreds of hungry sharks that circled the men as they waited for rescue.

As they hung in the water and clung to the few lifeboats, dying one by one, the men of the U.S.S. Indianapolis waited desperately for rescue. For nearly five days, they watched as sharks ate their fellow survivors, as men, hallucinating that they saw land in the distance swam off to their deaths, and as their tongues swelled and filled their parched and cracking mouths and throats. It was only by chance that an aviator spotted the men clinging to life in the water below and radioed for back-up help. When the rescue operation was complete, just over 300 men had survived.

Dozens of questions surrounded the sinking. Why had the Indy received no warning that Japanese subs might be in the area? Why were they given no escort? And most importantly, why had the navy failed to respond to the SOS signal? Why had the men waited nearly five days for rescue?

Captain Charles Butler McVay, the Indy’s captain, survived the attack and asked some of these questions. The navy not only did not answer him, they accused him of endangering his sailors and he became the only captain of over 400 whose ships sank in WWII to be court-martialed. Despite the insistence of his men that he had done everything he should have done and was not responsible for the loss of life, the navy pursued the court-martial. McVay was reprimanded and continued to serve, but years worth of accusations and blame from dead sailors’ families took their toll and he committed suicide in 1968.

A story that might have become a footnote in history books was resurrected in the late 1990’s by Florida student Hunter Scott, who heard about the dramatic and horrifying events surrounding the sinking of the ship and the court-martial of Captain McVay. Scott decided to pursue the story for his history fair project. He began contacting survivors, and after years of collecting their stories and documentation that had been classifief years earlier, gained the attention of a congressmen and had Captain McVay’s case re-heard. Eventually, the captain was exonerated.

Left for Dead is a terrific read—an adventure story, a legal drama, and an inspirational account of cross-generational friendship and triumph. Readers will be moved by Hunter Scott’s determination and by the survivors’ stories of the peril they faced and the years of struggle they endured as they fought to clear Captain McVay’s name.

Paulsen, Gary. Guts: The True Stories Behind Hatchet and the Brian Books. (YA Non-Fiction).

If you are a fan of Paulsen’s adventure books—Hatchet, The River, Brian’s Return and Brian’s Winter, you’ll definitely want to read his true stories about how he learned the techniques that Brian uses to survive in the wilderness. Paulsen describes adventures in his own life that taught him how to make a weapon with his bare hands, confront and survive a giant moose, survive the extreme cold, make a meal out of the foods found in the woods, and love the forest and the wilderness for all it had to offer.

These true stories of survival and strategy will appeal to anyone who loved Brian Robeson’s adventures and wants to learn more about wilderness living.

In the introduction to his latest memoir, Gary Paulsen recalls his son’s experience peeing on an electric fence. “An experiment,” the boy called it. “Will I ever stop doing things like this?” he asks his father. Paulsen writes, “I wanted to lie to him, tell him that as he grew older, he would become wise and sensible, but then I thought of my own life: riding Harley motorcycles and crazy horses, running Iditarods, sailing single-handed on the Pacific. I shook my head. ‘It’s the way we are.’” In the remainder of the book, he presents his case in a series of anecdotes about experiments with extreme sports that he and his friends conducted in their small Minnesota town.

Calling his activities “sports” seems a little like calling the antics from the MTV show Jackass “fun playtime stunts,” but nevertheless, Paulsen’s memoir of the crazy, dangerous things he did with his friends as an adolescent makes for some very entertaining reading.

In the title story, Paulsen recalls how his friend Carl Peterson attempted to set a skiing speed record—except that instead of sliding down a hill (which were hard to find in Minnesota), Carl was attached to the back of a car. And that car was going very, very fast.

Other stories include Paulsen’s attempt to go very a waterfall in a barrel, his friend Orvis Orvison’s wrestling match with a bear, his friend Emil’s flight across a farm on a giant kite, and several other death-defying stunts that you wonder how Paulsen and his friends ever made it to adulthood.

If you like action-packed, funny stories about people pushing limits (or will admit to watching the show Jackass), you’ll love Gary Paulsen’s hilarious tales of testing the boundaries of safety and intelligence.

Pomerantz, Gary. Nine Minutes, Twenty Seconds. (Non-Fiction)

Twenty-nine people—two pilots, a flight attendant, and 27 passengers—boarded ASA Flight 529 on August 21, 1995, a commuter flight bound for Georgia.

Less than ten minutes into the journey, one of the engines failed—basically fell apart in the sky and dangled from the wing, in full few of the passengers.

The flight attendant, Robin Fech, had prepared well for such an emergency, and is credited with keeping passengers calm and preparing them for the crash landing. When the plane hit the ground, however, the passengers and crew faced an even bigger challenge—escaping from the burning plane. They did so, but not without injury or loss of life.

The story of how they helped each other through the flaming hole in the fuselage and into the field where they had landed is an incredible and emotional story. Many of the passengers were severely burned and eventually, ten of them died. Nevertheless, there are stories of heroism here, stories of people who paused to help others when they could have saved only themselves, of pilots who were determined to land the plane and a flight attendant able to perform her job with professionalism even while facing death, and of people badly burned who fought for survival.

Last Breath: Cautionary Tales from the Limits of Human Endurance by Peter Stark

Using a series of absorbing but fictional accounts to illustrate the main ideas, Stark shows how the body reacts and either dies or is revived when placed in extreme situations: he shows us what happens when a person drowns, falls to their death, gets altitude sickness, develops scurvy, contracts malaria, suffers heatstroke and hypothermia, becomes dehydrated, gets the bends, or is attacked by predators. Although his accounts use current statistics and well-documented medical information, they are never too loaded with factual data to be interesting and compelling. And although the subject matter may seem morbid, the focus of the book is not on sensationalizing tragedy and death, but on educating readers about the possibility of danger in extreme situations, and often about how to avoid injury and death while enjoying the outdoors.

Stark has a talent for creating stories that are truly fascinating and scenarios that are not only believable, but emotionally engrossing. His writing demonstrates the best of the traits we look for in quality writing: free of cliches, always right on the mark with his words and image, and insightful. Many of the chapters end in almost poetic messages that reinforce the danger and the beauty of the wilderness and the amazing machinery of human survival.