Customer Reviews

Adrenaline 2002: The Year's Best Stories of Adventure and Survival

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Fourteen adventures: six stand alone articles and eight excerpts from longer works. Clearly Clint Willis did some homework finding these because I read most of the adventure mags and had only seen two of these during the year. Some of the excerpts come from books I would never have picked up otherwise, but now will look for - as the editor says in his intro, adventure comes in many forms, such as a foray into Golden Glove boxing or a black explorer's entry into an undiscovered African kingdom. Kira Salak's account of her capture in Rhodesia will have you sweating up to the last sentence and Rennicke's account of a trapped man journaling his last thoughts as he dies will force you to look inward, I'm sure. This is a strong collection that includes Lynn Hill as well as the controversial (and now deceased) Anatoli Boukreev, but unlike the editorial notes above it does not have a story on Willi Unsoeld or anything from Hampton Sides. Also, it isn't 364 pages - it's just under 300. This book makes a great intro to the series, or a great addition.

These Adrenaline books didn't last long, only through the first years of the new millennium, but they are a good source of finding great overlooked adventure pieces the other anthologies miss. Editor Clint Willis does his homework, scanning all kinds of American periodicals and books, as well as the flourishing British adventure-writing market. Unfortunately, he's more a discoverer than discerner, and some of these pieces are outright duds.

The best stories are by Michael Finkel, who writes about journeying into the Ténéré, the desolate center of the Sahara; Diana Souhami, who writes an engaging, often incredible account of the real-life Robinson Crusoe; Anatoli Boukreev, who writes about climbing through horrendous conditions on K2; Patrick Symmes, who writes about gaining access to a secret Maoist camp in Nepal; and Pagan Kennedy, who writes an account of a missionary adventurer who discovered secret kingdoms in deepest Africa.

There are also good stories by Jeff Rennicke, about a pastor's strange entrapment between rocks in Wyoming, and Kira Salak, about a dangerous journey through war-torn Mozambique in a moribund truck. Lynn Child and Topher Donahue write some straight climbing pieces about first ascents of El Capitan and peaks in Patagonia, respectively.

The pieces span time, from historical to current accounts, place, from New York City to, well, any of the places listed above, and subject, from adventuring, exploring, and surviving.

Some of the pieces take a loose definition of "adventure" and "survival": there are pieces on escaping the crashing Twin Towers on 9/11, escorting German prisoners in World War II, getting bitten by a snake, and boxing. The Twin Towers story would be fine if the writer Bryan Charles' voice weren't so obnoxious; the soldier story drags and drags, without really anything happening. The boxing story has no business in the collection at all.

And then there's David Fletcher's account of fighting a grizzly bear in Alaska. This thing is just absolutely ridiculous, obviously 100% fabricated, and one of the worst-written pieces I've ever read. According to Fletcher, Fletcher angers a mother grizzly bear in the Hayes Range and scars it somehow, thus calling it Scar Face. He alternates schizophrenically between reverence for the bear, terror for the bear, clumsy bravado towards the bear, and zany quips about the bear. Anyhow, this bear chases Fletcher into a glacial crevasse, which he hops around in like a lemur in the jungle, toying with the bear before slashing it some more, burning its face off, and escaping it once again. In the end, Fletcher climbs up an ice monolith that the bear is easily able to knock down--only onto itself, that is! This damn, dumb story reads like a Looney Tunes episode, and clearly not one word of it is true. Also, you get bits like this: "My food falls down the side of the tower. There are tears in my eyes now. I'm crying because I've got nothing left to eat. There are tears in my eyes also for a smouldering grizzly bear."

Disappointing...Only one or two good page-turners make it worth reading. But most of the stories in this book are not about true adventure or survival, one is written by a woman who seems to have put herself into perilous situations as a result of a severe lack of brains, so I could not respect her story. I also couldn't work up any sympathy for the mountaineer who felt it necessary to have relations with a goat. Apparently very few really adventurous things happened in 2002 so the author had to scrape the bottom of the barrel. Maybe we've 'done it all' and conquered the whole planet?