Product Description

Read by
Five CD's

A fascinating blend of adventure and science, LAST BREATH recreates in heart-stopping detail what happens to our bodies and minds in the perilous last moments of life when an extreme adventure goes awry.

With a growing number of people setting out to climb snow-capped mountains, swim choppy seas, and hike through dark, dense jungles, extreme deaths and brushes with death seem to have become everyday occurences. A compelling synthesis of science, history, possibility, and prevention, LAST BREATH examines the physiological, psychological, and emotional stages our bodies and minds endure at the brink of death. Listeners will shiver with a man lost in snowy woods, suffering from
hypthermia, as he tears off his clothes, burning up from cold. They will hallucinate with a young woman as she succumbs to a cerebral edema stranded at the top of Anapurna. And while a kayaker tumbles helpless underwater for 2 minutes, 5 minutes, 10 minutes, listeners too will gasp for their last breath.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1796095 in Books
• Published on: 2001-10-02
• Released on: 2001-10-02
• Formats: Abridged, Audiobook
• Original language: English
• Dimensions: 4.94" h x .99" w x 5.66" l, .49 pounds
• Binding: Audio CD

From Amazon.com
Prepare to have some of your greatest fears laid bare in this collection of riveting, and often terrifying, "cautionary tales from the limits of human endurance." Based on interviews with accident survivors and the medical specialists who treat them, veteran outdoor writer Peter Stark offers mostly fictitious accounts (there is one based on a true historical incident) of people caught in life-threatening situations. In Last Breath, he thoroughly explores what happens to the human body and mind during drowning, a long fall, burial beneath an avalanche, hypothermia, dehydration, mountain sickness, the bends, malaria, scurvy, hyperthermia, and contact with a poisonous jellyfish. Stark packs enough historic and scientific information and page-turning suspense into each chapter to make them all fascinating and useful. And he answers some perplexing questions in the process, such as why those suffering from acute hypothermia often rip off their clothing in an effort to save themselves.

No, Stark does not have some unresolved death wish--he readily admits that he fears death. But he also understands that the fine line between life and death actually entices outdoor adventurers to risk everything for the chance to explore their own physical and mental limits. In fact, it is exactly this close proximity to death that makes the experience come alive for certain individuals with the overriding desire "to strip away the superfluous, to remove the protective boundaries between that thing you call a self and something larger." These are the stories of those who crossed the line. --Shawn Carkonen

From School Library Journal
What happens to us when we try to climb higher, dive deeper, and in general risk death for the thrill of it.
Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From AudioFile
Here's a cheery item. Stark, a writer for OUTSIDE magazine, describes in clinical detail the kind of demise that might await kayakers, skiers, climbers, etc. In each case he invents a situation in which drowning, hypothermia, or high-altitude pulmonary edema could occur, then reports it in a husky, sincere voice. He doesn't need to inject added excitement; these secular parables have plenty. Stark's own escape on Mt. Washington plus middle age and family obligations have been cautionary experiences for him. The introduction mentions one true tale that does not in fact appear in the selections. Among what does is the fact that most crucifixion victims died of hyperthermia (overheating) and that the Humane Society was originally founded in Britain to prevent drownings. Adventurers, armchair or actual, will enjoy--and perhaps be warned by--Stark's words. J.B.G. © AudioFile 2002, Portland, Maine-- Copyright © AudioFile, Portland, Maine