I have a pile of survival books that I've bought with good intentions of reading them and writing reviews for ETS. This is the first that I actually found time to read and write a review for. Hopefully this won't be the last.


I'm a big fan of Les Stroud. I've enjoyed his TV shows and I also got quite a bit out of his book _Survive!_. In my mind, he's the "real deal" as far as survival experts go, but he also manages to be quite entertaining with his shows. It's an impressive combination.

Unlike _Survive!_, _Will To Live_ isn't meant as a survival text. It consists of a series of extreme survival stories gathered by Stroud from the survivors and other sources, with circumstances including antarctic, jungle, alpine, shipwreck, air crash, and just plain old poor judgement. All of the stories were new to me, and each was rich with useful detail of what the survivors (and some who were not so fortunate) did. More than that, Stroud works to give the reader insight into the mental and emotional states of the people he writes about. He is unabashed in stating his belief that the will to live trumps knowledge, equipment, and luck.

The author is not shy to call out excellence or poor judgement where he sees it, giving the reader some insight into what he would have done. Leavened with a few personal stories and morsels of survival lore, the book is tightly focused on its central thesis.

I enjoyed it. Some parts of the book were un-put-downable. If you liked _Deep Survival_ by Laurence Gonzales, you'll likely appreciate _Will To Live_.