Introduction

Juliane Koepcke : the girl who fell from the sky

Douglas Mawson : the man who came home alone

Hans Peter Strelczyk and Günter Wetzel : the friends who crossed the border by balloon

Tami Oldham : the woman who sailed into a hurricane

Roger Chapman and Roger Mallinson : the men who shared a sandwich on the seabed

Aron Ralston : the canyoneer who cut off his own arm

Poon Lim : the man who sucked blood from a shark

Ernest Shackleton : the commander who saved his crew

Hugh Glass : the trapper who grappled with a grizzly

Mauro Prosperi : the desert runner who drank his own wee

Sue Ruff and Bruce Nelson : the couple who were blasted by a volcano

Colby Coombs : the mountaineer who overcame an avalanche

Eric LeMarque : the snowboarder who took a deadly wrong turn

Craig Hosking : the pilot who crashed inside a volcano

Anna Bågenholm : the woman who froze to death

yet lived

Johann Westhauser : the caver who got trapped for a dozen days

John Capes : the survivor no one believed

Leonid Rogozov : the doctor who operated on himself

Rob Tesar : the student who was sucked under by quicksand

Greg Rasmussen : the conservationist who crashed in the Kalahari

Brant Webb and Todd Russell : the miners who spent two weeks underground

Claudio Corti : the climber who was snatched from the wall of death

Yossi Ghinsberg : the adventurer who went over a waterfall.