Out of Captivity: Surviving 1,967 Days in the Colombian Jungle

Impossible Odds: The Kidnapping of Jessica Buchanan and Her Dramatic Rescue by SEAL Team Six

Jessica Buchanan · 310 pages

A harrowing and heart-wrenching memoir of humanitarian aid worker Buchanan's kidnapping by Somali land pirates, her three months in captivity, her rescue by the Navy SEALs, and her husband's extraordinary efforts to help bring her home. In 2006, 27-year-old Jessica Buchanan arrived in Nairobi, Kenya, with long-held dreams of helping to educate African children. By 2009, she had met and married a

Twelve Years a Slave

Solomon Northup · 228 pages

Twelve Years a Slave is a harrowing memoir about one of the darkest periods in American history. It recounts how Solomon Northup, born a free man in New York, was lured to Washington, D.C., in 1841 with the promise of fast money, then drugged and beaten and sold into slavery. He spent the next twelve years of his life in captivity on a Louisiana cotton plantation.

A Captain's Duty: Somali Pirates, Navy SEALS, and Dangerous Days at Sea

Richard Phillips, Stephan Talty · 286 pages

Tells the dramatic life-and-death tale of the Vermont native who, in April of 2009, was held captive on a tiny lifeboat off Somalia's anarchic, gun-plagued shores.

3,096 Days

Natascha Kampusch · 328 pages

"3,096 days : The incredible story of eight years of abuse and humiliation-- and the fighting spirit that allowed her to escape unbroken"--Cover.

The Ledge: An Adventure Story of Friendship and Survival on Mount Rainier

Jim Davidson, Kevin Vaughan · 268 pages

"In June 1992, best friends Jim Davidson and Mike Price stood triumphantly atop Washington's Mount Rainier, celebrating what they hoped would be the first of many milestones in their lives as passionate young mountaineers. Instead, their conquest gave way to catastrophe when a cave-in plunged them deep inside a glacial crevasse--the pitch-black, ice-walled hell that every climber's nightmares are

Even Silence Has an End: My Six Years of Captivity in the Colombian Jungle

Ingrid Betancourt · 528 pages

Ingrid Betancourt tells the story of her captivity in the Colombian jungle, sharing teachings of resilience, resistance, and faith. Born in Bogotá, raised in France, Betancourt at age 32 gave up a life of comfort and safety to return to Colombia to become a political leader in a country that was being slowly destroyed by terrorism, violence, fear, and hopelessness. In 2002, while a candidate in th

The Pianist: The Extraordinary True Story of One Man's Survival in Warsaw, 1939-1945

Wladyslaw Szpilman · 224 pages

A Jewish pianist's real-life account of survival in World War II Warsaw. Separated in a mêlée, he fights to rejoin his family as they board the death train, but police block him. "Papa!" he cries. The father waves, "as if I were setting out into life and he was already greeting me from beyond the grave."

In the Presence of My Enemies

Gracia Burnham, Dean Merrill · 320 pages

A House in the Sky

Amanda Lindhout, Sara Corbett · 373 pages

"The spectacularly dramatic memoir of a woman whose curiosity about the world led her from rural Canada to imperiled and dangerous countries on every continent, and then into fifteen months of harrowing captivity in Somalia--a story of courage, resilience, and extraordinary grace. At the age of eighteen, Amanda Lindhout moved from her hardscrabble Alberta hometown to the big city--Calgary--and wor

Lost Moon: The Perilous Voyage of Apollo 13

Jim Lovell, Jeffrey Kluger · 378 pages

The One That Got Away

Chris Ryan · 376 pages

Jungle: A Harrowing True Story of Survival

Yossi Ghinsberg · 320 pages

South: The Story of Shackleton's Last Expedition 1914 - 1917

Ernest Shackleton · 375 pages

In 1911 Roald Amundsen beat Robert Falcon Scott to the South Pole, and Scott and his colleagues all died on the return journey. Ernest Shackleton, who had served with Scott on a previous expedition, decided that crossing Antarctica from sea to sea was the last great unattempted journey on the continent. His Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition of 1914-17 was a failure. But perhaps because it failed

Finding Me: A Decade of Darkness, a Life Reclaimed - A Memoir of the Cleveland Kidnappings

Michelle Knight, Michelle Burford · 252 pages

Describes the details of the abduction and decade-long captivity of one of the three survivors of notorious Cleveland kidnapper Ariel Castro, and how she found the courage to endure unimaginable circumstances and never lose hope for the future.

Into Thin Air: A Personal Account of the Mount Everest Disaster

Jon Krakauer · 371 pages

When Jon Krakauer reached the summit of Mt. Everest in the early afternoon of May 10,1996, he hadn't slept in fifty-seven hours and was reeling from the brain-altering effects of oxygen depletion. As he turned to begin the perilous descent from 29,028 feet (roughly the cruising altitude of an Airbus jetliner), twenty other climbers were still pushing doggedly to the top, unaware that the sky had b

In the Company of Heroes: The Personal Story Behind Black Hawk Down

Michael J. Durant, Steven Hartov · 416 pages

Adrift: Seventy-Six Days Lost at Sea

Steven Callahan · 255 pages

Last Man Off: A True Story of Disaster and Survival on the Antarctic Seas

Matt Lewis · 229 pages

"On June 6, 1998, twenty-three-year-old Matt Lewis had just started his dream job as a scientific observer aboard a deep-sea fishing boat in the waters off Antarctica. As the crew haul in the line for the day, a storm begins to brew. When the captain vanishes and they are forced to abandon ship, Lewis leads the escape onto three life rafts, where the battle for survival begins"-- "There's nothing

A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier

Ishmael Beah · 234 pages

A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier (2007) is a memoir written by Ishmael Beah, an author from Sierra Leone. The book is a firsthand account of Beah's time as a child soldier during the civil war in Sierra Leone (1990s). Beah was 12 years old when he fled his village after it was attacked by rebels, and he wandered the war-filled country until brainwashed by an army unit that forced him to u

The Story of a Shipwrecked Sailor

Gabriel Garcia Marquez · 106 pages

In 1955, Garcia Marquez was working for El Espectador, a newspaper in Bogota, when in February of that year eight crew members of the Caldas, a Colombian destroyer, were washed overboard and disappeared. Ten days later one of them turned up, barely alive, on a deserted beach in northern Colombia. This book, which originally appeared as a series of newspaper articles, is Garcia Marquez's account of

A Stolen Life

Jaycee Dugard · 273 pages

In the summer of 1991 I was a normal kid. I did normal things. I had friends and a mother who loved me. I was just like you. Until the day my life was stolen. For eighteen years I was a prisoner. I was an object for someone to use and abuse. For eighteen years I was not allowed to speak my own name. I became a mother and was forced to be a sister. For eighteen years I survived an impossible

Night

Elie Wiesel · 126 pages

A Long Walk Home: One Woman's Story of Kidnap, Hostage, Loss - and Survival

Judith Tebbutt · 344 pages

This is the story of how, over a period of one hundred and ninety-two days, I was torn away from the life I knew and loved, and dragged down to the depths of despair; of how I endured enforced isolation and near-starvation at the hands of Somali pirates; and of how I made a choice to survive by any and all means that I could muster. In September 2011 Judith Tebbutt and her husband David set out on

Between a Rock and a Hard Place

Aron Ralston · 368 pages

Hiking into the remote Utah canyonlands, Aron Ralston felt perfectly at home in the beautiful natural world. Then, at 2:41 p.m., eight miles from his truck, in a deep and narrow slot canyon, an eight-hundred-pound boulder tumbled loose, pinning Aron's right hand and wrist against the canyon wall. Through six days of hell, with scant water, food, or warm clothing, and the terrible knowledge that no