Customer Reviews

Last Breath: The Limits of Adventure

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(5)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

This might look like a morbid subject, but it isn't really. Every single one of us is going to die, and although we become very good at not thinking about it - developing a kind of mental blind spot that hides the awareness - it might be a good idea to give it some thought. Besides, we could pick up some tips that put off the evil hour. Such as not deciding to ski the rest of the way when our car breaks down in subzero conditions a few miles from the friend's house where we are going. Such as taking the right anti-malarial drugs before going to a part of the world where that disease is endemic. Or not free-soloing a rock face of difficulty 5.9 with no one else in sight or hearing distance.

As Peter Stark explains, risking your life helps you to experience life more fully. But sometimes risks turn out badly, and then it may be too late to be sorry. "Last Breath" tells you exactly what it is like to drown in a "hole" while kayaking a turbulent river, to die of dehydration in the Sahara, or to be buried by an avalanche. So you don't need to try these experiences yourself - which is a good thing, if you want to go on living.

This book is packed with fascinating information about our bodies, how they work, and their relationship with the surrounding environment. Without the support of technology - clothes, houses, heating, and so on - human beings can live only in a narrow band close to the Equator, below 3.5 miles above sea level, and where there is plenty of fresh water. Stark drives home to the reader just how easy it is to misjudge things when stepping outside the ideal environment. Sometimes just one wrong movement - or even one necessary thing left undone...

At the end of "Last Breath", I found there was a wonderful unanticipated bonus. *I* was still alive!

While one reviewer did not like this book at all, I can't agree with him that the characters were not engaging. Even though it is hard to create characters who are only in one situation, and who mostly die at the end of the story, I think the authour succeeded in showing interesting characters. Given the main purpose of the book was to show the physiological ways of death, I was glad the authour didn't focus on creating deep character studies. That would distract from the reason I personally bought the book - to learn about the human body, and how it can die. I am now reading this book again, and don't regret buying it at all.

I just bought this book yesterday, and have been unable to put it down since then. It's an edge of your seat book and I highly recommend it to anyone who is involved in sports of any kind. It really makes you think. Highly recommended!!!

This was a good read. I followed the unfolding of one desparate story after another with interest. The medical side line was also interesting information. I appreciated the author's preface explaining how he got his information and what was fictionalize. It certainly helped that he has participated in most of the sports contained in these experiences gone wrong. This book was a unique find for me, as I had never read much adventure before.

I will always remember this book as the one which led me to reconsider my discounting of Pauling's Vitamin-C-megadose-theory due to the chapter 5, which contains selected tidbits of True History ( of scurvy ) interwoven with plausible fiction.

Four stars because the "plausible fiction" often sounds so contrived - for five stars the author might rewrite the book after searching for more tidbits of True History to base each scenario upon.

Still, to read the wikipedia article confirming that humans ARE genetically defective - opposable thumb check, but we can no longer make Vitamin-C while e.g. goats still can, and an adult goat will synthesize "about 13,000 mg" per day, more when sick. Strangely, no one had ever explained it to me that way before !

Before I bought this book, I wanted something really exciting about the nature and human body. This book just satisfied me in many ways.
It has eleven chapters total, and each chapter has different stories. It mainly talks about extreme conditions on the earth such as Mountain Everest, Sahara dessert, avalanche, the jungles in Africa, predators, and so many more.
Each chapter describes these conditions in detail. Characters in each chapter risked their life to the nature. Every character is about to die in the story. Some survived, some died. This book shows how they struggle to survive in harsh environment. It also explains why they were about to die and how their condition of bodies changed. It has exciting information about human bodies, how they function, and their relationship with the surrounding environment. It was more like reading the science book rather than adventure story. The book version of the TV show "Man vs. Wild."
If you really want to try some extreme adventure, read this book first. You are going to realize how dangerous the adventures are. So you do not need to try these experiences for real.

What happens when the human body, evolved and adapted to life in the balmy savanna, ventures beyond its limits -- often far beyond? Peter Stark, who has written for "Outdoors" and "Smithsonian," has compiled this series of cautionary tales about people, who through the medium of extreme sporting, have placed themselves at grave risk. He tells us that his tales are composites of true events. Each deals with some aspect of human frailty. There's the man who gets his jeep stuck in a snowdrift and decides to ski 5 miles in a bone-chilling night to his cabin. There's the East German bicyclist competing furiously in Appalachia on a muggy day. There's the 20-something snowboarder cutting through virgin powder in the bowl of a Utah mountainside. Each of Stark's subjects encounters the consequences of playing the edge. Each suffers when they exceed the body's ability to handle extreme heat, cold, altitude or blunt trauma. Stark tells each story from three angles. First, there is the personal angle -- what kind of person is attracted to these sports, and what kind of life do they lead? Then, then is the mental angle -- what is it like inside the mind of a person who is freezing to death or dying of buried under an avalanche? Then there is the physiological angle -- what is going on inside the body of these victims? Along the way, we learn of the body's fantastic, though limited, adaptive mechanisms -- sweat glands, O2 and CO2 sensors, startle and shivering reflexes. And we learn of not-so-rare circumstance in which these adaptations can be overcome by the elements. An overheated bicyclist, for instance, may be doomed simply by the darkness of her riding outfit on a sunny race day.

I found this book compelling and informative. The mix of personal, mental and physiological facets was just right, taking this out of the realm of the textbook. Though composites, Stark's characters seemed real, and even likable in spite of their risky lifestyle preferences. And, I grew to appreciate both the rush that extreme sporters seek, all the while feeling for them as human beings when they lost their grip on the rock face, plunged into the rapid or felt themselves buried under a mountain of snow.

This book is entertaining, but many times follows a very cliche pattern of speech and character. The first thing that the consumer must know is that these stories are FICTIONAL and based off of several accounts that the author received from friends and interviews. Somehow the information presented packs less of a punch with the knowledge that the stories are not true. Also, I could not help but get the sense that the author was trying to impress me with his outdoors saavy (he repeatedly trumpeted his talent as a backcountry skiier and kayaker and such) and his misguided word usage. The medical information is sometimes informative and other times very cloudy and vague. Stark's attempt to mix medical fact with fiction is a bit akward. Do NOT look to this book for survival skills! At best, it provides a small window into human physiology.

Overall, this book is a fun and fast read, but not worth adding to your library.

Last Breath is a book that strives to be at once emotionally compelling and supremely factual. Or something. I don't see any evidence that it is trying very hard. Last Breath falls short in both aspects; the story telling is abysmal and its factual segments are at best dumbed-down, at worst outright wrong. Stark relies too much on proximity to death as a way to affect the reader: having blunt emotional trauma on his side, he spurns all aspects of good writing, and in this I include original metaphor, realistic characters, engaging writing style, and the junior-high rule (which still applies) of not using the same word twice in one sentence. All of the characters in Last Breath are alotted (at most) two traits: first, a piggish whininess and, second, a generic characteristic intended to generate sympathy. In several stories, Stark holds the families of his protagonists hostage in order to bully us, the readers, into craving a happy ending. Poor Jeremy! What will become of his little daughter? It made me want a lobotomy. The narrative, dull and cliche-ridden, lurches back and forth between the ordeals of irritating protagonists and a mishmash of anecdote and diluted physiological fact. In trying not to write over the heads of his audience, Stark oversimplifies and introduces ambiguity into everything that he tries to explain. Furthermore, neither he NOR his editor can be trusted as credible, having let slip the following statement, which is significantly contradictory of actual fact: "This is because [cardiac muscle] contains negative ions- certain types of atoms that are missing electrons." The most readable parts of Last Breath are the largely unaltered stories and anecdotes, not difficult to find in their original contexts, that Stark has gathered from others. In the end, this book does not convey any deeper understanding of death, and, in its attempts to marry the realms of fact and fiction, it lacks merit in either. I feel stupider for having read this.