Ranulph Fiennes leads expeditions for a living. In this recording he relates astonishing tales of his adventures to a theater audience. He describes his business cycle, which starts with "scrounging for sponsorship," and says his "boss" is his literary agent because each expedition needs to be able to produce promotion worth more than the sponsorship. Fiennes begins with the idea that he will travel only to hot places, so he hovercrafts 4,000 miles up the Nile River. Later, turning to the opposite extreme, Fiennes leads the first polar circumnavigation of the Earth and the first unsupported crossing of the Antarctic continent. Fiennes's storytelling style is laconic and hilarious. This wonderful production is a cross between comedy and amazing tales of endurance. A.B. © AudioFile 2005, Portland, Maine--
Copyright © AudioFile, Portland, Maine
--This text refers to the
Audio CD
edition.
Product Description
Brought up in South Africa, he never knew his father, who had died in the Italian Campaign the year before he was born. Ranulph followed his father's path into the Royal Scots Greys. After that came the SAS, from which he was dismissed for blowing up an American film set at the idyllic Cotswold village of Castle Combs, then two vicious years as a volunteer fighting communist insurgents in Oman. Then began the series of expeditions for which Fiennes is best known and which caused The Guinness Book of Records to hail him in 1984 as 'the world's greatest living explorer.' Up the White Nile in a hovercraft, parachuting onto Europe's highest glacier, forcing his way up 4,000 miles of terrifying rivers in northern Canada and Alaska, overland to the North Pole and to the ends of the earth, across the world's axis-the Transglobe Expedition-which took ten years from conception to completion. He writes here too about his attempt to reach the North Pole without dogs or motorised equipment, beating the world record by 300 miles, his determination to find the lost city of Urbar in the Arabian desert and, finally, his extraordinary journey across the Antarctic Continent via the South Pole. Living Dangerously is a remarkable testament from a remarkable man.
