6 thinkers, books, and ideas connected to this field.
Scottish WWII soldier who survived the fall of Singapore, the Death Railway construction as a Japanese POW, a hellship sinking, and a nuclear bomb — his survival account The Forgotten Highlander containing the most extreme concentration of individual wartime suffering and survival of any personal memoir.
Alfred Lansing's 1959 account of Ernest Shackleton's 1914–16 Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition — where his ship was crushed by ice and the entire crew survived through extraordinary leadership — the definitive account of survival leadership.
Anglo-Irish polar explorer — famous for the failed but heroic Endurance expedition (1914–16), where his ship was crushed in Antarctic ice and he led all 28 crew members to survival across 800 miles of open ocean in a lifeboat.
American Olympic distance runner who survived 47 days adrift on a raft in the Pacific after his WWII bomber was shot down — then survived 2 years in Japanese POW camps — and whose story of survival, PTSD, and religious transformation was told in Laura Hillenbrand's Unbroken.
Alistair Urquhart's 2010 memoir of his WWII experience — falling of Singapore, Japanese POW camps, Death Railway, hellship sinking, Nagasaki atomic bomb aftermath — which presents the most extreme accumulation of survival ordeals in any single first-person account.
Laura Hillenbrand's 2010 narrative non-fiction biography of Louis Zamperini — Olympic runner, WWII bombardier, Pacific raft survivor, Japanese POW — which became one of the best-selling works of narrative non-fiction ever published.