Nonfiction BookTalker-Facing Death
Booktalks that will quicken the pulse of older readers
By Kathleen Baxter -- School Library Journal, 6/1/2001
In 1832, fresh out of college, Charles Darwin was set to become a clergyman when a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity shot like a meteor into his life. The HMS Beagle was preparing to set sail for a voyage around the world. Darwin had been recommended for the unpaid position of naturalist in order to study animal and plant life during the voyage. Winning the job depended on the ship's captain, Robert FitzRoy, liking him, since the two men would have to spend the voyage crammed together in a tiny space.
Luckily for Darwin, FitzRoy took to him, at first. Their five-year adventure became an event that would ultimately rock the world, because as Darwin observed and collected specimens, he began to question the literal truth of the Bible. He discovered seashells on mountain tops that clearly had been under water at one time. If this was really true, he wondered, then how could the earth have been created in only one week, 4,000 years earlier? Darwin's evolving beliefs made Captain FitzRoy furious. According to the captain, the Bible was absolutely and literally true and who was Charles Darwin to deny it? Darwin's momentous discoveries, fraught with physical danger and scientific adventure, are described in Darwin and the Beagle by Alan Moorehead (1969, 2000), the most recent title in a series of beautiful editions of classic stories published by the Adventure Library. A good adventure can concentrate the mind wonderfully, to paraphrase Dr. Johnson, and middle and high school readers, especially boys, will be captivated by Darwin's historical journey.
And if they think Darwin's life at sea was tough, ask them to imagine serving on a ship that sank. Such was the fate of Steven Callahan, who set sail in 1982 in a small sloop bound for the Caribbean, only to find himself adrift in the ocean for 76 days. His book, Adrift: Seventy-Six Days Lost at Sea (Adventure Library, 1986 and 1999) will make your listeners lick their lips with thirst.
Equally thrilling is Jim Corbett's Man-Eaters (1944 and 1997), especially the bone-chilling account of a savage leopard attack. Corbett was a conservationist whose job was to destroy the man-eating leopards that were terrorizing Indian villages, one tigress had already killed, and partially eaten, more than 400 people. Corbett shows how hunting wild game not only involved risking death but was frequently boring and uncomfortable. Not all adventures, however, are chosen. Jan Baalsrad, a Norwegian patriot who trained to sabotage German airfields during World War II, was the sole survivor of a 1943 Nazi attack on the small boat bringing him to Scandinavia. His efforts to navigate frozen fjords and mountains while returning to freedom in Sweden nearly killed him. Watch for the scene in which he is forced to cut off nine of his own toes in We Die Alone (1955 and 1996).
Like Baalsrad, Slavomir Rawicz was a victim of savage politics. As a Pole in Russia at the beginning of World War II, he was considered a criminal and an enemy spy. Rawicz was captured in his own home and imprisoned in Kharkov, where he spent much of his time in a kishka, a tiny cell, where he was forced to stand in his own filth. Rawicz refused, despite beatings, to sign a false confession of guilt, and insisted on his innocence. But his captors drugged him and got his signature, a tale he records in The Long Walk (1956 & 1999). The details of Rawicz's escape and how he gathered and led a group of resourceful companions will pull you breathlessly through the book.
The Adventure Library can be reached at (800) 754-8229, or viewed at www2.gorp.com/advenlib/Default.htm. Other titles include Alive, Endurance, and The Blue Nile. Devouring these tales of frostbite, vicious leopards, cramped and frozen quarters, and unbearable hunger and thirst will quicken the pulses and breathing rates of your booktalk audience. These adventures simply can't be improved on unless you happen to be reading them by flashlight during a blackout.
