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A well-written account of how Callahan spent 76 days alone and adrift in a life raft after his ship sank in a storm. He was an expert sailor and had been on a long solo voyage before that, so he was well-equipped to handle the situation. He goes into fascinating detail about how he set up his tiny raft (complete with hand-drawn diagrams), caught fish, etc. Even so, it was a dire situation and he survived only by means of extreme resourcefulness, previous foresight (he’d read and recalled other people’s adrift at sea accounts, and bought a “large” raft intended for six people because he could barely move in the smaller ones), and a lot of good luck.
That is, good luck considering that his ship sank, he nearly drowned trying to grab his survival duffel bag, ships passed him by without spotting him, and several crucial elements of his raft turned out to not work very well. On the other hand, he could have drifted in a direction where no one would have ever found him.
Callahan always had an essentially spiritual relationship with the ocean, which this experience only deepened, so the book falls into the category of “my relationship with nature” as well as straightforward survival story. I could have done with more of the aftermath but these sorts of books virtually always skimp on that, so I’m resigned. It’s considered a classic of first-hand survival experience and for good reason. My edition (Mariner) has a charming introduction which is well worth reading.
Only $2.99 on Kindle! Adrift: Seventy-six Days Lost at Sea
What true survival stories are your favorites?
That is, good luck considering that his ship sank, he nearly drowned trying to grab his survival duffel bag, ships passed him by without spotting him, and several crucial elements of his raft turned out to not work very well. On the other hand, he could have drifted in a direction where no one would have ever found him.
Callahan always had an essentially spiritual relationship with the ocean, which this experience only deepened, so the book falls into the category of “my relationship with nature” as well as straightforward survival story. I could have done with more of the aftermath but these sorts of books virtually always skimp on that, so I’m resigned. It’s considered a classic of first-hand survival experience and for good reason. My edition (Mariner) has a charming introduction which is well worth reading.
Only $2.99 on Kindle! Adrift: Seventy-six Days Lost at Sea
What true survival stories are your favorites?
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Thanks for the Donner Party rec! That sounds really interesting, and I've never read an entire book about it. I love the idea of focusing on just one of the women present.
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Also that great book about Scott and Amundsen called "The Last Place on Earth". My sister basically held me down and forced me to read it and I was so glad she did. Could not put it down.
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I thought the third one was very useful and informative, but I reviewed it critically here (where I did an annotated bibliography of Antarctic literature in general) and in a dedicated post here. Relevant quote: "[Huntford] will quote things out of context and trust that you haven't read them in context. Make sure it's not the only thing you read, at any rate."
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Immediately after Scott's death, in the dying throes of the British Empire, you saw a huge romanticization of Scott as the perfect exemplar of old-school British values, practically granted martyr status, with Amundsen dismissed as a dirty cheater. Amundsen resented the hell out of it, and I don't blame him.
A few decades later, new values had shifted to the forefront, and there was a pendulum swing in Amundsen's favor. Huntford was one of the people responsible for rehabilitating Amundsen and pointing out that purely from the perspective of competence, he was actually much better at the whole polar exploration thing than Scott ever was. Unfortunately, Huntford went about this by dismissing Scott as an unredeemed bungler and blaming him for everything that went wrong, while glossing over everything Amundsen did wrong (helped by the fact that Amundsen always glossed over his own difficulties, whereas Scott's final diary entries basically describe a series of unfortunate events). I think what Huntford did is valuable, and his work worth reading, but flawed.
Lately, scholarship has been attempting to strike a more balanced perspective, where we acknowledge that, yes, Amundsen was objectively better at lots of things than Scott, but that doesn't mean that 100% of his decisions were good and that 100% of his success was due to his good decisions, or that 100% of Scott's decisions were bad and 100% of his failure was due to his bad decisions. In my opinion (at least based on my incomplete reading), we still have a ways to go.
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Touching the Void by Joe Simpson. Both a movie and a stage play have been made from that one. I used to be a rock climber, and it was a terrifying scenario to me: your choice is to cut the rope and let your partner fall to his death, or be dragged down yourself. Simpson was the partner that was let fall, and astonishingly he survived and dragged himself back to camp, where his partner had fallen into a guilty depression.
Some historical adventure survival books I enjoyed were Alfred Lansing's Endurance: Shackleton's Incredible Voyage (I have Shackleton's book also, but I liked Lansing's better), and Laura Hillenbrand's Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption (which I think was also made into a movie?)
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Touching the Void is great. I've read the book and seen the movie, but I had no idea it was a stage play! I wonder what the staging was like.
The Hillenbrand book is a great story but with both it and the movie, I wanted more of a sense of the protagonist's inner life/personality.
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I went on a road trip to Bristol with my mum (theatre person) to see it. Given the subject matter, it's so inherently unstageable that it has to be either genius or painfully embarrassing -- no middle ground is possible -- and she'd heard via her thatre contacts and reviews that it was the former. And it was.
I will attempt to supply more details as my brain permits! (Been on a train all day, short on caffeine.)
ETA: I believe the production's going to be doing a US tour, btw, and would highly highly recommend it to anyone who gets a chance to see it.
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I haven't read any survival stories, but I can tell that one thing I'd like about them is the guarantee of the happy ending. I could read about how scary things got knowing that the protagonist is going to make it in the end.
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It's true, "survival" inherently at least has the protagonist alive at the end!
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... hopefully this doesn't sound like I hated the book, because I didn't (like everyone that summer, I read it, and I enjoyed it a lot, as you say, as a portrait of a particular mindset). It was just fascinating to see how incredibly into that book a lot of outdoorsy 20-year-olds got. That dude was a lot of people's personal Jesus that summer.
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It’s alright, you want to fight, you’ve got a hunger
I was just like you when I was younger
Head full of fantasies of dyin’ like a martyr?
HAMILTON
Yes.
WASHINGTON
Dying is easy, young man. Living is harder.
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I also liked that Gonzales is honest about the very large role chance plays in these situations.
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I haven't read a lot of survival books – which is odd, now that I come to think of it – but a while back I was hunting around the "reality" survival TV genre, and I remember that the only show I really clicked with was the first season of Man, Woman, Wild, in part because they'd occasionally have episodes where they'd look around and go "Okay, no, this situation is not actually survivable for us, even though we did everything we could. We're going to call in the rescue chopper." And they'd actually make a point of saying, look, sometimes you can be a badass expert and do everything right and still not have a chance. (I also enjoyed the show because the first season was all about the two stars supporting each other and using their strengths. ...the second season jumped up the "We're making editing decisions to play up interpersonal conflict for teh drams!" thing, and I noped out.)
For other survival narratives I look back on fondly: the podcast Futility Closet has some great episodes, but I particularly enjoy Crossing Africa for Love (for the most British conversation in recorded history) and Can A Kitten Climb The Matterhorn? (and all the discussion of the episode generated in reader comments which are read in subsequent episodes, which are fun in an almost xenofictive sense of looking at how different animals are adapted to different things).
I think the most survival-esque book I've read semi-recently is The Worst Hard Time, which is haunting, and almost an inversion of a usual survival narrative: not one person or a small group but whole communities, and not about being lost in unfamiliar ground but what happens when familiar ground turns hostile around you.
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I was coincidentally and for no particular reason recently looking up why the Dust Bowl happened and ended - I know some of the music and books and art (etc) that was about it, but not that much of the actual history. Probably my big associations are The Grapes of Wrath (of course, but I've read the book, seen the movie, worked on a stage version, and know both Woody Guthrie's "The Ballad of Tom Joad" and Bruce Springsteen's "The Ghost of Tom Joad." (I nearly put "can sing," only I can't really. But I do know the lyrics.)
Not to mention Karen Hesse's Out of the Dust, the most depressing YA novel of all time - in verse. An Amazon review went something like, "After the heroine accidentally burns her pregnant mother to death it just goes downhill from there."
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I just went back and re-read the first bit of The Worst Hard Time, because I remember it being beautiful. And then I needed to re-read the entire introduction. I feel like some of my reaction comes from having grown up on the Great Plains, though outside of the Dust Bowl area, but yeah, it still hits me hard.
The first two paragraphs:
...
If you're into podcasts at all, Futility Closet is one of only two that I've loved enough to stay current on, and probably one of only maybe four that I'd go out of my way to recommend, and it's definitely my favorite of anything I've listened to. (I'll go back and re-listen to a bunch of its episodes, as comfort food.) It's a hodgepodge of historical curiosities, unsolved mysteries, disasters, weird culture, and just random interesting stuff, and while there's a very clear jump in quality between early episodes and later ones, it still benefits from being listened to from beginning to end. Partially because there's an active community of listeners who write in with updates to stories and such. But those updates and such usually take place after the main story; there's usually one 15-minute-ish feature, a smaller curiosity, and then listener mail and puzzles at the end.
A representative sample of some of the main features I really love:
Ep. 15, the Flannan Isles Mystery – the episode that got me into the podcast in the first place; an unsolved mystery ep.
Ep. 46, The Serum Run to Nome – survival, history imitating a thriller/drama, and competence porn all rolled into one!
Ep. 58, English As She Is Spoke – good when you need a laugh: probably the worst phrasebook ever written. A random curiosities ep.
Ep. 128, The Battle for Castle Itter – a weird history ep; "So, just to freeze the action here for a second, this just gets more and more interesting: an American tank Commander is directing an SS Captain and a Wehrmacht Major to lead American and German troops in defending an Austrian castle containing French political prisoners from the Waffen-SS. This is sometimes called 'the strangest battle of World War II', and you can see why."
(The other podcast I'm current on is the much-more-polished 99% Invisible, which is all about design, broadly defined. And the other two I recommend are You Are Not So Smart, which is about the science of self-delusion, and Serial, which, hey, I didn't know Season 3 was out! I connected with Season 1 more than Season 2, so I guess we'll see how Season 3 is.)
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Thanks for the podcast recs! I was actually looking for some recently. I only like nonfiction in podcast form for some reason.
What is kind of hilarious about the flaming mom book is that all the terrible things that happen during the Dust Bowl don't actually have anything to do with the Dust Bowl: https://rachelmanija.dreamwidth.org/212898.html
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Almost all of the advice here is solutions to "how did they miss us?" which it sounds like Callahan still experienced decades later.
http://www.ibiblio.org/hyperwar/USN/ref/WarInst-Merch/index.html
Not exactly a survival story (though there are survivors in some of the threads), but Sebastian Junger's The Perfect Storm really did a good job of putting the people affected into a wider context of why they were out there when the storm hit.
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I've read many of the Arctic and Antarctic explorers' journals, which I suppose would fit the "true survival" genre:
The South Pole; an account of the Norwegian Antarctic expedition in the Fram, 1910-12 by Roald Amundsen
The North-West Passage: Being the Record of a Voyage of Exploration of the ship "Gjøa" 1903–1907 by Roald Amundsen
The Journals of Robert Falcon Scott
The Worst Journey in the World by Apsley Cherry-Garrard
South! The Story of Shackleton's Last Expedition 1914-1917 by Ernest Shackleton
Farthest North by Fridtjof Nansen
There's just something about reading these people's own words, and also I do like the journal format. Of these, my favorite is maybe the Shackleton. But I do have to say that Nansen seems to have been pretty cool. He wrote Norway's first doctoral thesis in neurobiology, was later a professor in oceanography, skied across Greenland, attempted to reach the North Pole including surviving over a winter with not much equipment and supplies, and got the Nobel Peace Prize for his work helping refugees after WWI. Look at him being a badass here.
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I read it when it was published in the 1970s, so I can't guarantee that it still holds up.
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