Combining The Worst-Case Scenario Survival Handbook and Into Thin Air, award-winning documentarian Mick Conefrey's The Adventurer's Handbook draws lessons from the glory days of exploration.
What makes a good explorer? Adaptability, ambition, stamina, self-confidence, curiosity, optimism, authority—and fundraising ability. Though few of us will ever have to face a charging elephant, or survive solely on penguin stew, when it comes to project management, crisis aversion, or any number of everyday problems, there is much we can learn from the larger-than-life tales of the world's most famous adventurers.
Here, award-winning documentarian Mick Conefrey pulls practical advice from their original diaries and logs, like how to survive an anaconda attack (wait until it has swallowed your legs, then reach down and cut its head off), and how to keep morale up (according to Ernest Shackleton, 'A good laugh doesn't require any additional weight'). In addition to the wonderful characters and stories, this book offers many lessons on how to set sail without a clear path home.
Answers to some important questions, courtesy of The Adventurer's Handbook:
* How many corpses are believed to be on Mt. Everest?
Answer: 120
* How is polar bear meat best prepared?
Answer: Raw and frozen.
* What do you do if attacked by a charging lion?
Answer: Stand very still and stare it down.
* What should you wear when crossing a desert?
Answer: Lots of layers—fabric absorbs sweat and prolongs its cooling action.
On June 4,1924 George Mallory donned an oxygen set and set off for the summit of Everest with his young partner Andrew Irvine. Next day they were glimpsed through clouds heading upwards, but after that they were never seen again. Whether they died on the way up or on the way down no one knows.
In the years following his disappearance, Mallory was elevated into an all-British hero. Dubbed by his friends the 'Galahad' of Everest, he was lionised in the press as the greatest mountaineer of his generation who had died while taking on the ultimate challenge. Handsome, charismatic, daring, he was a skilled public speaker, an athletic and technically gifted climber, a committed Socialist and a supremely attractive figure to both men and women. His friends ranged from the gay artists and writers of the Bloomsbury group to the best mountaineers of his era. But that was only one side to him. Mallory was also a risk taker who according to his friend and biographer David Pye, could never get behind the wheel of a car without overtaking the vehicle in front, a climber who pushed himself and those around him to the limits, a chaotic technophobe who was forever losing equipment or mishandling it, the man who led his porters to their deaths in 1922 and his young partner to his uncertain end in 1924.
So who was the real Mallory and what were the forces that made him and ultimately destroyed him? Why did the man who denounced oxygen sets as 'damnable heresy' in 1922 perish on an oxygen-powered summit attempt two years later? And above all, what made him go back to Everest for the third time?
The dramatic and compelling account of the first attempt to climb Mount Everest, published to coincide with the centenary of the expedition in 2022. Though it remains by far the world's most famous mountain, in recent years Everest's reputation has changed radically, with long queues of climbers on the Lhotse Face, lurid tales of frozen corpses and piles of high altitude trash. It wasn't always like this though. Once Everest was remote and inaccessible, a mysterious place, where only the bravest and most heroic dared to tread. The first attempt on Everest in 1922 by George Leigh Mallory and a British team is an extraordinary story full of controversy, drama and incident, populated by a set of larger than life characters straight out of Boys Own and Indiana Jones. The expedition ended in tragedy when, on their third bid for the top, Mallory's party was hit by an avalanche that left seven men dead. Using diaries, letters, published and unpublished accounts, Mick Conefrey creates a rich character driven narrative, exploring the motivations and private dramas of key individuals and detailing the back room politics and bitter rivalries that lay behind this epic adventure.
