Customer Reviews

The Third Man Factor: The Secret to Survival in Extreme Environments

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

 

 

This is a great book of revelation detailing experiences many have had and not understood. It is not a book of science but a book of wonder at a "mystery." Not all mysteries need to be solved scientifically. My 1911 encyclopedia states "uranium is a useless metal." This FASCINATING AND ARTICULATE BOOK IS A FIVE STAR READ FOR ANYONE WHO STILL HAS A LIFE OF INTEREST...DREAMERS AND POETS.

This book is entertaining but doesn't really dive in to explore the various occurrences and how they might be different. It's more a collection of stories, often one right after the other with little or no analysis. The author will start off a chapter with an idea described in a paragraph or two, then launch into story after story with little insight, to the point of feeling like you're reading a scrapbook of newspaper clippings...very few interviews with the subjects (those who are still alive). Also very few original ideas are offered by the author, mostly just summarizing work other scientists have done.

It's entertaining reading at times, and certainly well-researched, but the book has a feeling as though it was written a bit too early, before the author had time to process everything and present it in a coherent manner. While this might be the fault of the subject matter, consider the precision with which philosophers have treated the very same subjects of the metaphysical world.

Generally entertaining read but don't expect much more.

The author has compiled an impressive collection of instances of the 'third man' phenomenon--the sensation that one's survival is aided by an 'extra' presence in times of great duress.

Beyond the compilation of a plethora of third-man stories (from mountain climbers, castaways at sea, arctic explorers, over-worked medical students, etc.), the author considers various explanations to the phenomenon. From the divine (supernatural) to the arcane (an artifact of the brain's reaction to low-level magnetic fields) to the evolutionary (a relic of the caveman's bicameral brain). The book provides plenty of anecdotal material and explores the various explanations without drawing a final conclusion. The reader is free to draw his own extrapolations from the raw data.

A good read. Provides plenty of nourishment for intellecutal expediture.

A disapointment overall. While the survival stories were well written, the author simply retold them too often - citing them for his many different examples of explanations without telling the reader how one story could be an example of more than one theory. Also, the author spent so much time on the stories that he scrimped on the theoretical information. He fails to explore less extreme examples in which practitioners claim to be able to to "create" similar "out of body" or "transcendence" experiences without traveling to the ends of the earth. The conclusion seems to have a very unfinished quality to it, for example, how does the Swiss brain experiment (in a laboratory) in which a woman is induced to "annoying" shadow spatial dislocation "near her shoulder" lead to the conclusion that somehow athletes/scientists/explorers in extreme circumstances (climbing mountaintops or lost in the oceans) who "feel" a vivid, comforting, interactive personality are experiencing a similar brain manipulation? The book has a rushed feeling to it, as if the writer was too eager to create a sensation instead of a finished theory. The reader is left wondering just how much "research" really went into this volume.