True Grit – Bear Grylls

Released: 2013

This book is like Marmite – you’re going to love it or hate it.

Bear Grylls is a man who has led many record-breaking expeditions and is an adventurer and all-round tough guy. In this book he recounts the extraordinary exploits of people whose stories inspired him and shaped him as a person.

True Grit is a collection of epic, true tales of heroism and survival, illustrating the extent to which human beings will go to in order to survive. Grylls rounds off each story with his own summary of the qualities and strength of the human spirit, revealing his admiration for the sheer physical tenacity to hold onto life which each of these individuals displayed.

Many of the accounts are harrowing, gruesome and unpleasant to read, but if you persevere through the book I think you too will be astonished and amazed by these people’s experiences. It makes our own complaints about queuing in traffic or the train being late take their proper place in the grand scheme of things – just petty inconveniences really. Try reading about the young man who lived through an air crash and was forced to eat fellow dead passengers in order to survive. That will ground you.

This is an anthology of personal survival stories, of individual heroism, endurance and mental and physical toughness and, in spite of some of the content, really is an inspiring and entertaining read.

★★★★