|  You can kill off the original inhabitants, and most of the world’s wildlife, and still live on the land. But I doubt that we can live fully on that land accompanied only by increasing crowds of consumers like ourselves and a few hybrid domesticated animals turned into producing machines. A sure poverty will follow us, an inner desolation to match the devastation without.
— John Haines The word account is intended here to have two different meanings – on the one hand, true stories about survival under difficult conditions, whether written by the survivor or someone else; and, on the other hand, attempts to account for the ability of some people to survive where others cannot. The term “will to live” is often used to explain that difference, but the term runs a great risk of circularity: the only way to know whether someone has the will to survive is to see whether that person survives or not. The books listed below, I think, go some way toward demystifying this concept. In the accounts of survivors, we can judge just what sort of people they were, with what qualities of character and what strengths and weaknesses; in accounting for their survival, the more psychological texts emphasize – perhaps surprisingly – not naked determination, but determination tempered by flexibility, humor, and moral commitment.
 Lennard Bickel, Mawson's Will (South Royalton VT: Steerforth Press, 2000), ISBN 1-58642-000-3. This book is subtitled The Greatest Polar Survival Story Ever Written, and that is not far from the truth. If you are seeking to understand the survivor personality, here is experienced Australian explorer Sir Douglas Mawson, who chose not to go with Robert Scott to the South Pole in 1911, but instead set out on a less prestigious expedition to chart 1,500 miles of Antarctica's coastline and claim it for the British crown. His party of three – yes, three – faced mountains, crevasse-filled glaciers, and sixty-mile-per-hour winds. After six weeks, one man fell into a crevasse, along with the tent, most equipment, and all but a week’s supply of food, and then the other member and the dogs were lost, leaving Mawson to fight his way back home alone.
 Steven Callahan, Adrift: Seventy Six Days Lost at Sea (New York NY: Random House, 1996), ISBN 0-34541-015-7. Callahan is the only person in history to have survived more than a month alone at sea in an inflatable raft. When his small sloop sank, he found himself adrift in the Atlantic in a five-and-a-half-foot raft, with only three pounds of food and eight pints of water. Racked by hunger, buffeted by storms, and broiled by the tropical sun, Callahan drifted for seventy-six days over eighteen hundred miles of ocean. He fought off sharks with a makeshift spear and watched nine ships pass by without turning back. He distilled water by the spoonful with a primitive still, and wasted to just over a hundred pounds, living on a diet of raw fish. Callahan's inventiveness and improvisation skills are amazing. This book is one of the essential survival stories, both impressive and inspirational. As Callahan later wrote, “Although I experience a sort of living death, I am awakened to new sensitivities about my place in the universe and society, which infuses the experience with a sense of awe and wonder as much as pain and desperation.”
 Terrence Des Pres, The Survivor: An Anatomy of Life in the Death Camps (New York NY: Oxford University Press, 1980), ISBN 0-19502-703-5. How did people survive in the Nazi and Stalinist death camps? More important, how did they survive with their humanity miraculously intact? Des Pres documents the secret, subtle, amazing strength shown by ordinary people under the most murderous circumstances. He explodes the myths of the Jews going to their deaths “like sheep,” and of survivors saving their own lives by becoming amoral. Rather, those who survived were driven by an obligation to the dead to bear witness, and they survived not by abandoning but by maintaining their moral sensibilities – by cooperating with each other and sharing their tribulations and successes. To stay alive was by itself an act of resistance. Survival in the wilderness is often facilely attributed to an undefined “will to survive.” This book gives that notion its true content.
 David Howarth, We Die Alone (New York NY: Lyons Press, 1999), ISBN 1-55821-973-0. First published in 1955, this book is distinguished historian David Howarth’s account of Jan Baalsrud’s remarkable survival story. In 1943, Baalsrud and three other expatriate Norwegian commandos sailed from Northern England to Nazi-occupied Norway to organize and supply the Norwegian resistance. But they were betrayed and ambushed, and only Baalsrud escaped. Frostbitten and snowblind, trapped on a freezing island above the Arctic Circle, leaving a trail of blood in the snow as he is pursued by the Nazis, he finds shelter in a remote arctic village. The villagers, seeking their own revenge against the Nazis, were determined to keep him alive and get him to neutral Sweden. The book is an inspiration, with the added virtue of being true.
 John Krakauer, Into the Wild (New York NY: Vintage Anchor, 1997), ISBN 0-38548-680-4. In 1992, 23-year-old Christopher McCandless was found dead by starvation in an abandoned bus in the woods of Alaska. A young man with a bright future – a college education, material comfort, uncommon ability and charm – he had given $25,000 in savings to a charity, abandoned his car and most of his possessions, burned all the cash in his wallet, and hiked into the Alaska bush to “live off the land,” carrying a bag of rice, a Waldenesque assortment of paperback books, and a hopelessly inadequate .22-caliber rifle. Why did he do this? Why did he die? Top outdoor reporter Krakauer undertakes to trace the last two years of McCandless’ life, but he accomplishes much more: he shines a light on the forces that drive people to drop out of society and test themselves in the wilderness. Endlessly fascinating.
 Alfred Lansing, Endurance: Shackleton’s Incredible Voyage (New York NY: Carroll & Graf Publishers, 1999), ISBN 0-78670-621-X. First published in 1959, this is the classic account of the 1914 journey of explorer Ernest Shackleton and his crew from England for Antarctica, where Shackleton hoped to be the first man to cross the then uncharted continent on foot. Five months later, the Endurance – just a day’s sail short of its destination – became locked in an island of ice. For ten months the icebound Endurance drifted until it was finally crushed, and Shackleton and his crew made an 850-mile journey in a 20-foot craft through the South Atlantic's worst seas to reach an outpost of civilization.
 John Leach, Survival Psychology (New York NY: New York University Press, 1995), ISBN 0-81475-090-7. Leach, a professor of psychology at the University of Lancaster in the UK, considers the psychology of human survival – how groups and individuals behave before, during, and after life-threatening events. Much of the material is drawn from studies of responses to natural disasters, but he also refers to survival in such places as prison camps and the wilderness. He addresses both short- and long-term survival, and – most interestingly – the specific psychological consequences of hunger, thirst, cold, heat, crowding, isolation, fatigue, and sleep deprivation. The conclusions are condensed into a set of principles for psychological first aid for use in the field.
 Edward Leslie, Desperate Journeys, Abandoned Souls: True Stories of Castaways and Other Survivors (New York NY: Houghton Mifflin, 1998), ISBN 0-39591-150-8. From the famous to the little-known, Leslie recounts the stories of those who have been cast away and marooned on islands and rocks, in deserts and jungles, by shipwrecks and plane crashes. The stories include those of Alexander Selkirk, the model for Robinson Crusoe; an unnamed Dutch seaman put ashore on a desert island in 1725 for homosexuality; Marguerite de la Roque, a sixteenth-century French woman who was betrayed as an adulterer by her adventurer cousin on an Atlantic voyage and then left to die, pregnant, on an island off the coast of Canada with her servant and her lover. But beyond the sheer human interest and passion of these stories, Leslie seeks to explore the moral dilemmas these survivors faced, the personalities of those who survive in desperate situations, and the influence of survivors on society.
 Primo Levi, Survival in Auschwitz (New York NY: Simon & Schuster, 1996), ISBN 0-68482-680-1. In 1943, Levi, a twenty-five-year-old chemist and "Italian citizen of Jewish race," was arrested by Italian fascists and deported from his native Turin to the death camp at Auschwitz. First published in 1947, this book is a chronicle of systematic cruelty and miraculous survival. How do you survive under the most brutal and horrifying conditions? The following typical passage describes the women’s camp: ”[A]t dawn the barbed wire was full of children's washing hung out in the wind to dry. Nor did they forget the diapers, the toys, the cushions and the hundred other small things which mothers remember and which children always need. Would you not do the same? If you and your child were going to be killed tomorrow, would you not give him something to eat today?” This is true survival described with restraint and compassion.
 Jennifer Niven, The Ice Master: The Doomed 1913 Voyage of the Karluk (New York NY: Hyperion Books, 2000), ISBN 0-78686-529-6. The Karluk set out in 1913 in search of an undiscovered continent, led by explorer Vilhjalmur Stefansson, with the largest scientific staff ever sent into the Arctic. Soon after winter had begun, they were blown off course by polar storms, the ship became imprisoned in ice, and the expedition was abandoned by its leader, who chose a dozen of the best sled dogs and set off “to go hunting,” accompanied by his personal secretary, the expedition photographer, and an anthropologist. Hundreds of miles from civilization, the castaways had no choice but to find solid ground as they struggled against starvation, snow blindness, disease, exposure, and each other. After almost twelve months battling the elements, twelve survivors were rescued, thanks to the heroic efforts of their captain, Bartlett, the Ice Master, who traveled by foot across the ice and through Siberia to find help. What is striking about this account is the range of behavior shown by the survivors, from noble self-sacrifice to bitter selfishness: some men resorted to stealing and lying, while others risked their lives for the survival of the group. This is a powerful account of the range of human behavior under stress.
 Slavomir Rawicz, The Long Walk (New York NY: Lyons Press, 1997), ISBN 1-55821-684-7. Slavomir Rawicz was captured by the Red Army in 1939 and sent to a Siberian labor camp along with other captive Poles, Finns, Ukrainians, Czechs, Greeks, and even a few English, French, and Americans. In 1941, he and six fellow prisoners escaped and walked south across 4,000 miles of the most forbidding terrain on Earth – out of Siberia through China, the Gobi Desert, Tibet, and over the Himalayas to British India, where Rawicz reenlisted in the Polish army and fought against the Germans. This book, subtitled The True Story of Trek to Freedom, is the story of that march, through cold, hunger, thirst, heat, high elevations, and human brutality and kindness.
 Al Siebert, The Survivor Personality (New York NY: Berkley Publishing, 1996), ISBN 0-39952-230-1. Survival in the wilderness is often said to depend on a generally ill-defined “will to live.” What the term means is not easy to say. Al Siebert is a psychologist who has spent more than forty years puzzling over the question of who survives under extreme conditions and who does not. Research on World War II combat survivors led him to conclude that survivors tend to be those who respond to challenge with humor, wisdom, and mental and emotional flexibility – that is, those who have the greatest repertoire of available coping mechanisms. This book reworks those themes primarily in the context of coping with stress and trauma in everyday life. There is more pop psychology in here than I usually like, but the lessons are clearly applicable to survival under wilderness conditions as well.
 Joe Simpson, Touching the Void: The True Story of One Man’s Miraculous Survival (New York, NY: Perennial Currents, 2004), ISBN 006-073-055-2. I challenge you to put this book down once you have started to read it. In 1985, two skilled British mountain climbers, 25-year-old Joe Simpson and 21-year-old Simon Yates, decided to climb the previously unscaled western face of Siula Grande in the Andes. They chose to climb Alpine style, without setting up stocked camps and supply depots, but rather in one big push, carrying all of their supplies with them. The difficult climb soon turned into disaster when Simpson fell off an embankment and shattered his leg. As the two attempted to climb down, another series of accidents left Simpson stranded in a crevasse, on an outcropping 50 feet below the surface, with no possible way to climb out. Believing that Simpson could not have survived the fall, Yates continued down to the base camp, burdened with guilt, and unknowingly leaving his severely injured friend behind. How Simpson managed to get down the side of the mountain all by himself is one of the truly great survival stories. Simpson writes movingly about the awesome beauty and attraction of the mountain, and his endurance, heroism, and modesty come across clearly. Yates had been criticized for his actions on the mountain, and Simpson wrote this book, in part, to exonerate his friend. Simpson seems to be that kind of guy.
 Robert Trumbull, The Raft (Annapolis MD: The Naval Institute Press, 1992), ISBN 1-55750-827-5. Subtitled The Courageous Struggle of Three Naval Airmen Against the Sea, this book is a straightforward account of a remarkable feat of survival – three naval airmen adrift on a four by eight foot rubber life raft in the Pacific for 34 days. The book lets the incidents speak for themselves – seeking protection from the sun, wind, and storms; struggling for every drop of water and scrap of food; and overcoming the hopelessness of being adrift. The men were equipped with just the few things they could grab from their sinking plane and the contents of their pockets; the loss of a safety pin was a catastrophe. This is a tale of endurance and brotherhood.
 Robert, Whitaker, The Mapmaker’s Wife (New York NY: Basic Books, 2004), ISBN 0-7382-0808-6. The survival part of the title comes into play only toward the end of this fascinating true story, but the preceding background – a detailed account of the eighteenth-century French expeditions to precisely measure the shape of the earth and thus to confirm or refute Newtonian physics – has its own rewards. Jean Godin, the youngest member of the expedition to Peru, falls in love with and marries thirteen-year-old Isabel Gramesón, a young woman of the privileged Hispanic Peruvian upper class. They plan to move to France; he travels ahead to French Guiana, where he is stranded by international politics; after twenty years of separation, Isabel – who has lived her entire adult life in her village, has rarely traveled far from home, and has certainly never spent a night outdoors – decides to travel to meet him through 3000 miles of Amazon jungle, packing for the trip as if it were an excursion to a ball – fancy dresses, shawls, gold-buckled shoes, lace-trimmed underwear, fine china, golden rosaries, various male relatives, and, of course, servants and slaves. Five months later, Isabel stumbled alone out of the jungle, half naked, her bare feet so cut and swollen she could not put on shoes, her brothers and nephew dead, having survived disaster and treachery by sheer force of her imperious will. Whitaker’s description of the risks of eighteenth-century jungle travel is vivid – “There are giant stinging ants,” he writes, “ants that bite, and ants that both bite and sting” – and the scientific and social history is fascinating.
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