Last Breath: Cautionary Tales from the Limits of Human Endurance

Rating:
Summary: Excellent light and educational reading
Review: "Last Breath" makes for a very good educational read on many different ways of dying. The information in the book ties together the psychological and physiologcal factors of people in extreme conditions, and also provides some helpful information on how to increase your chances of survival.

Other reviewers have commented negatively on the characters being fictional. I felt that had you not been told by Peter Stark to begin with, it would have been difficult to know that they weren't real stories. Furthermore, the use of fictional characters allowed the author to include all of the important details and circumstances that can occur during a given struggle, in just one story.

Rating:
Summary: Great storytelling - but it's different from what you think
Review: First the good news. The author obviously knows what he's writing about, and this gives the stories lots of energy and impact. Also, he's a very good writer, setting up great situations and characters - you'll want to know what happens to them and keep reading.
Finally, the medical facts are very well researched - somewhat morbidly so, but that's the nature of this topic, so be it.

The bad news is that this is not, as you might be thinking by reading the blurbs, a book about survivors' stories. It might have been very interesting to hear the stories from the words of real survivors... but the blunt reality is that often there are no survivors at all. In fact, the general pattern (with a couple of exceptions) of each story goes like: "X did this very foolish thing because X was an imbecile full of itself, so a condition arose... and then X died".

Surely an interesting read, especially if your interest in tanathology is not as deep as the one in good stories.

And I'd make this book mandatory reading for anyone into extreme sports. Just to get them scared. Naughty, ain't it?

Rating:
Summary: A Fascinating Read for the Morbid Couch Potato.
Review: My chances of suffering any of the fates of the adventurers in Peter Stark's book are as remote as the locations of his short stories. Nonetheless, I must admit that he puts you in scary places and confronts you with your own mortality. Last Breath is a great read for the beach or for the suspicious reader who believes that his terrible demise awaits him at every turnout on life's otherwise prosaic road. The tales are horrifying and yet fascinating. Stark's medical details provide the gravity and realism. They lend weighty balance for the morbid voyeurism that infects anyone who reads his book. It's great. Avalanches, killer jellyfish, jungle fever, hallucinatory scurvy, raging rapids and more. It's enough to cause any couch potato to settle back and bask in the glorious safety of his Lazy Boy, content in the superior wisdom of his sedentary life.

Rating:
Summary: Amazing work
Review: This book is one of the best I've read in a long time. To the first reviewer, he clearly didn't understand this book, as is shown by the following reviews.

The author is brilliant, after the chapter on thirst I went to the fridge and drank two sodas right away. The writing is intelligent, you don't get the feeling he's trying to dumb it down to the lowest common denominator. There is just enough medical information to make you understand what is going on physically, but not overwhelm you.

I highly, highly suggest you read this book.