Kenneth Kamler

St. Martin's Press

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Surviving the Extremes: A Doctor's Journey to the Limits of Human Endurance

Release Date: 20 January, 2004
Hardcover

Amazon.com
Medical case studies can be fascinating to read, full of drama, heroism, and sometimes tragedy. Most doctors' tales take place in clinics or hospitals, but those pedestrian settings are not for Kenneth Kamler, who practices medicine outside, patching people up with surprising success under harrowing conditions. Surviving the Extremes starts with open-air surgery in the steamy jungles of the Amazon River, moves to disturbingly detailed descriptions of the many ways humans can die at sea, and from there takes white-knuckled readers through the rest of Earth's extreme environments. Krakauer fans will gasp at the book's best chapter, covering the high-altitude medical feats Kamler has performed on Mt. Everest and other peaks. "No course in medical school taught me the proper mixture of oxygen, IV fluids, and Tibetan chants to treat a subdural hematoma in below-zero temperatures on a 3-mile-high glacier," Kamler writes. Instead, he has learned the fine art of adventure doctoring by doing it, and in the process, he's won fans among the world's most prominent risk-takers. Through it all, Kamler remains fascinated by the human body's ability to heal under horrifically dangerous conditions. His medical adventures are inspiring and thrilling, as well as occasionally bloody and disgusting. In short, perfect stories of human survival. --Therese Littleton

From Publishers Weekly
Ever since Jon Krakauer's Into Thin Air, books about human survival have captured readers' imagination. Add this book to the list. Kamler is no office-room doctor, preferring to use his skills on survival missions. As he puts it in his prologue, "I practice medicine where I don't belong." He takes the reader along on his explorations-be they on the Amazon or on Mt. Everest. While on the former, he used his medical techniques to save locals; on the latter, he saved climbers, including some of those threatened during the ill-fated 1996 climb chronicled by Krakauer. But Kamler's book is far more than just a story of his own explorations. He uses his journey as a launching point for investigating the nature of survival. In a style reminiscent of Oliver Sacks, he details remarkable stories of human endurance in adverse conditions-adrift at sea in a raft, lost in an unknown desert-while simultaneously educating the reader in the science of survival. For Kamler, the secret lies in the brain, which provides the key to survival: "If the will is there, the brain initiates actions that are appropriate responses to the environmental stress." Even readers who aren't survivalists themselves will find their brains stimulated by Kamlers fluid writing and lively stories.
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Review

"Ken Kamler is a natural writer, as well as an adventurer and a prober into how much human beings can stand. In Surviving the Extremes, he brings personal experience and scientific knowledge together beautifully, giving us narratives which are powerful, moving, and very real."
--Oliver Sacks

"...the book's grisly details - from half-severed arms to shriveled, shrunken heads - are fascinating and cautionary. It's like the literary version of television's CSI, set in some of the world's most menacing terrain."
- Outside Magazine

Rating 4.0

Not flawless, but very good!

I liked this book a lot. It had strengths and weaknesses; obviously the author is very knowledgable about an area of medicine that doesn't get much attention most of the time. Kamler is clearly a neat guy, with lively interests, and he seems to have been literally everywhere and done everything! But in reading his book I got the feeling that he is very, very, very impressed with himself. Sometimes the book seemed less about the physiology and environments than it was about the number of times that Kenneth Kamler, M.D. has saved the day. This could be a bit annoying at times.
The stuff I found most interesting was the material on the high elevation (particularly timely since a Canadian explorer just died on Mt Everest) and the "lost-at-sea" stuff. I thought the descriptions of how the body gradually shuts down under various circumstances were really interesting. I was a bit dismayed that there wasn't much about survival on polar expeditions, and I found a few minor technical errors here and there. A few pictures or diagrams would have added a lot to the text. But it was a very good book, and certainly kept me reading.

I Liked This Book

Very well written and fodder for the imagination...a must for couch potatoes that live their lives through others everywhere!

Excellent book

I've been and probably will be again in situations along these lines. It's good to know some of these things.

Caught a typo where he describes the Jerboa having a tale (instead of tail). A gaffe where he says that proteins are the keys to genes. (Should be DNA, although proteins are integral to the form and functioning of chromosomes.)

All in all a great read. I was surprised he didn't mention Cabeza de Vaca's ordeal of survival walking across from Florida to Spanish settlement in Mexico almost 500 years ago after being shipwrecked.

I've had the thought sometimes of working on a field medicince support book that would give directions for how to make a scalpel, how to anesthetize a patient, and things like that in primitive conditions. I thought about that after spending some time with a Russian born and trained former military physician who knew a tremendous amount about how to walk in with nothing at all but bare hands and knowledge. I don't have all that knowledge, but somebody should compile it.

Like the old guys would say - "Never say die kid! Just get up again, no matter what."