The Fine Line Between Adventure & Madness.
Where falls the line between adventure and madness? Geoff Powter, a practicing clinical psychologist, looks into the stories of eleven troubled adventurers, divided into three categories: The Burdened, The Bent, and The Lost covering the following personalities - Polar explorer Robert Falcon Scott; Meriwether Lewis; Everest climber Maurice Wilson; Aviator Jean Batten; Polar balloonist Solomon Andre; and Aleister Crowley, a brilliant mountaineer. In each of these stories, darkness of some kind -- ambition, ego, a thirst for redemption, the need to please others -- carried these characters in a perilous direction. In the end, understanding these difficult but utterly human stories helps us comprehend the deepest purpose and allure of adventure, and, ultimately, to more honestly measure ourselves.
