Customer Reviews

The Last Hero: Bill Tilman, a Biography of the Explorer

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Bill Tilman was indeed the 'Last Hero'. His exploits are absolutely unbelievable. From being wounded twice in the first world war, to a coffee planter in kenya, to cycling across africa in the 1930s, climbing Kilimanjaro, Mt Kenya and the Ruwenzori, the first ascent of Nanda Devi in 1936, reaching 27,200 on Everest without oxygen 1938 (many with Eric Shipton), fighting behind enemy lines in Italy and Albania in the second world war, finally sailing to such remote regions including Greenland and Spitsbergen. Unfortunately this biography does not match the orginal 'High Mountains and Cold Seas' by J. Anderson which is now out of print. Tilman was a great author with a great sense of humour. His 7 mountain and 7 sailing books rate as possibly the best travel/adventure books ever. However, if this is the only book on Tilman you can get hold of, it is still worth the read.

Was Tilman as small, no pun intended, as this author portrays him to be? I hope not. Please do yourself a favor and not invest your valuable life time in this work or should I say folly.

I do not know why Dr Madge wrote this book, other than an understandable desire to take money from the ever gullible public and put it in his pocket.

He is out of sympathy with his subject, knows little of sailing, and repeatedly misunderstands what he has read in Tilman's own writings.

He has a lamentable tendency to cut the facts to suit the cloth of his hypothesis - that of the selfish, miserable, impossibly demanding old misanthrope.

Having myself sailed with Tilman, I can state categorically that Madge regularly gets his story backwards, in part no doubt because unlike Tilman he has no sense of humour that anyone can detect, and his picture of a man who, armed with a pipe and a pint, was a formiddable raconteur, is just plain wrong!

Buy JRL Anderson's biography, High Mountains and Cold Seas, and better still read Tilman's own books, which you can buy right here...

Bill Tilman was happiest when his crew was Australian. Bill Tilman was comfortable in his old boats as they set off on voyages of months and years, and he could not understand why others aboard felt otherwise. This is an uncomfortable book in that it portrays the selfishness of an explorer, the selflessness of the explorer. Bill Tilman was a very hard man on himself, and anyone else who thought they had the stamina to go with him. A must read for anyone thinking of going on an Outward Bound course.