Living Dangerously: The Autobiography of Ranulph Fiennes By Ranulph Fiennes
Living Dangerously: The Autobiography of Ranulph Fiennes
The Defiant, High-Stakes Chronicle of Transglobal Expeditions, SAS Mutiny, and the Survival Blueprint of the World’s Greatest Living Explorer
The Defiant, High-Stakes Chronicle of Transglobal Expeditions, SAS Mutiny, and the Survival Blueprint of the World’s Greatest Living Explorer
Bibliographic Specifications
- Title: Living Dangerously: The Autobiography of Ranulph Fiennes
- Author: Sir Ranulph Fiennes
- Publisher: Macmillan London Ltd, London
- Publication Date: 10 September 1993
- ISBN-10: 0333444175
- ISBN-13: 9780333444177
- Edition Details: First UK Hardcover Edition, First Printing. Monumental Polar and Desert Exploration Archive.
- Binding: Original publisher’s premium cloth-bound hardcover casing with gold-stamped spine lettering and custom illustrated maps layout templates.
- Physical Format: Octavo (8vo), 320 pages. Generously enhanced with an extraordinary repository of high-contrast black-and-white family archival snapshots and full-colour frontline on-location expedition photography plates mapping the polar axes.
- Language: English
Official Condition Report
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The Book: Used – Like New / Fine (F)
- Exterior / Boards: The original cloth hardcover casing is in absolute showroom condition. The panels are flawlessly flat, completely clean, and square at all corner tips. The cloth binding remains robustly unyielding, showing zero linear shelf-lean, vertical structural collapse, or pushing to the head and tail bands. Displays only the most microscopic, superficial signs of minor shelf wear along the extreme lower board margins.
- Interior: The text block is exceptionally crisp, bright, and perfectly tight. All 320 internal pages are clean, white, and completely intact. The leaves remain entirely free of traditional user highlighting, underlying travel annotations, library stamps, owner name inscriptions, or folded dog-ears. A beautifully maintained, collector-grade survivor that has been meticulously looked after thus far.
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The Dust Jacket: Used – Like New (LN)
- Condition Detail: The original illustrated paper dust jacket is present, whole, and completely entire. Exhibits only the most microscopic, superficial signs of minor shelf friction along the extreme margins from safe storage. The jacket faces retain their bold color saturation, and it comes fully protected with a premium Cellophane cover, which guards against future handling while presenting an immaculate display profile on a collector's shelf.
Synopsis & Historical Value
Published in 1993—capturing his life right as he concluded his historic, grueling crossing of the Antarctic continent—Living Dangerously stands as an exceptional, raw, and deeply engrossing biographical chronicle of human endurance. Brought up in South Africa, Fiennes never knew his father, who died in the Italian Campaign the year before his birth. Following his father's path into the Royal Scots Greys, his military journey later took him into the elite Special Air Service (SAS)—from which he was famously dismissed for blowing up an American film set in the idyllic Cotswold village of Castle Combe—before spending two vicious years as a volunteer fighting communist insurgents in Oman.
Bypassing standard, sanitized travelogues, this autobiography strips down the mental and physical architecture behind the expeditions that caused The Guinness Book of Records to hail him as "the world's greatest living explorer." Fiennes maps out his legendary point-by-point runs: navigating the White Nile in a hovercraft, forcing his way up 4,000 miles of terrifying rivers in northern Canada, and orchestrating the monumental, ten-year Transglobe Expedition across the world's axis. From his attempt to reach the North Pole without dogs or motorized equipment to his grueling determination to find the lost city of Ubar in the Arabian desert, this near-fine hardcover collectible copy serves as an indispensable primary historical archive for polar historians, geographers, and serious adventure bibliophiles alike.
Author Profile: Sir Ranulph Fiennes
Sir Ranulph Twisleton-Wykeham-Fiennes, 3rd Baronet, OBE, is a British explorer, author, and a monumental giant of global survival culture. Renowned globally for his unbreakable physical resilience, severe mental discipline, and a psychological drive that permanently redefined international exploration records, he became the first person to visit both the North and South Poles by surface means, and the first to cross the Antarctic continent entirely on foot. Over a lifetime of elite expeditions, his structural contributions to geography and human endurance testing earned him the prestigious Polar Medal.
Fiennes’s unique literary talent allows him to cut through dry logbooks to translate complex route logistics, sub-zero navigation charts, and near-fatal frostbite survival encounters into a highly polished, definitive historical masterpiece. His expert handling of technical mechanics, military operations, and extreme environments ensures that his memoirs serve as an authoritative, definitive primary historical record of the planet's most grueling cross-continental achievements.
ranulph fiennes living dangerously used collectible book rare polar exploration macmillan london 1993 first edition hardcover transglobe expedition sas army history memorabilia 0333444175 #
