Out There

The Batshit Antics of the World's Great Explorers

By: Peter Rowe

Narrated by: John E Wolfe

The years 1800-1940 were the heyday of the independent explorer—free-spirited, mostly European adventurers who took incredible risks in pursuit of discovery and fame. Some lit out for the mysterious city of Timbuktu, others the source of the Nile River, or the elusive Northwest Passage over Canada, or the fabled lost cities of Latin America, or the North or South Poles—quests that obsessed nineteenth-century explorers and hardly matter today. They were a special breed of traveller: courageous and determined, gluttons for punishment, frequently self-financed, and often horrendously misinformed and ill-prepared. While a lucky few returned home in glory, far more starved or froze or succumbed to cannibalism or died of malaria or dysentery or at the hands of angry locals or wild beasts or were simply never heard from again.

In equal parts eye-opening, shocking, and hilarious, Out There is a totally original account of their extraordinary exploits.

©2023 Peter Rowe (P)2023 Sutherland House Books

Fascinating stories told with humor, awful editing

While I often find history pretty dry, this book was engaging. It's a fun and funny way to begin learning about this material, although I sometimes got the sense that the author was using crude language just for the sophomoric hell of it. Not a big deal unless you're a puritan. A worse issue is that the audio editor seems to have gotten lazy as the book went on. I started hearing odd background noises and a repeated word or two about halfway in, and then the appendix doesn't seem to have been edited at all, as on several occasions you can hear the narrator pause, make adjustments, and then start the same sentence over. If I were the narrator I'd be pissed about that, because he did a pretty good job. Anyway, those issues aside this was a good listen in a genre that I probably don't expose myself to often enough.

I Wish School Was This Fun

“Out There” was so funny that I couldn’t listen to it on my exercise machine because I would laugh so hard that I would lose my stride and have to stop.

I adored the book. I recommend it unreservedly.