Conville & Walsh
The Third Man Factor
True Stories of Survival in Extreme Environments
- Author: John Geiger
- Category: Non-fiction Psychology Science
- Publisher: Canongate(UK)/Weinstein(US)/Penguin(Canada)/Text(Australia)
- Pub date: 2 July 2009 (UK)
- Length: 320 pages
About The Third Man Factor
International Bestseller
Call it a guardian angel, call it hallucination, it’s fascinating. Geiger’s account combines history, scientific analysis and true-life tales to haunting effect. I couldn’t put this down, and when I did couldn’t sleep for thinking about it
– Bookseller
Fascinating… it’s not hard to see why The Third Man Factor has caught the public’s imagination. Geiger seamlessly mixes high-octane survival tales with neurological theories, spiritual asides, psychological studies and historical accounts
– Calgary Herald
THE THIRD MAN FACTOR is a biography of an extraordinary idea: that something wonderful is happening to people who experience life at its most extreme, even at the very time of the cruellest of hardships.
For scores of explorers, mountaineers, prisoners of war, sailors and astronauts have survived great stress and danger to life, only to reveal that an unseen companion guided them through the worst of their ordeal. Witnesses range across a spectrum from Sir Ernest Shackleton and Charles Lindbergh, polar explorers Robert Swan and Ann Bancroft, climbers Hermann Buhl and Doug Scott, to US astronaut Jerry Linenger.
As the legendary Italian mountaineer Reinhold Messner, who experienced the phenomenon on both Nanga Parbat and Everest, put it: ‘It is leading you out of the impossible’. Among the many people living today who can attest to the force is 9/11 survivor Ron DiFrancesco, who was guided through a smoke and fire-filled stairwell in the South Tower of the World Trade Center moments before it collapsed. A gripping and commercial exploration of this extraordinary syndrome, setting out all the various explanations, THE THIRD MAN FACTOR also is, first and foremost, a stirring inventory of the most remarkable survival stories ever told.
About the Author
John Geiger is the author of five books of non-fiction, including the international bestseller Frozen In Time: The Fate of the Franklin Expedition, which describes the results of the Franklin Forensic Project. He also authored, with Dr Peter Suedfeld, the scholarly study, ‘The Sensed Presence as a Coping Resource in Extreme Environments.’ He has lectured widely, including presenting talks at the Wellcome Centre for the History of Medicine (University of London), the Explorers Club, New York, and the 2009 ideaCity conference.
His documentary film appearances include Channel 4 (UK), and PBS NOVA (US) in “Arctic Passage”, BBC4 in “Wilderness Explored: Arctic”, The Discovery Channel (US) in “Islands of Mystery: Dead Silence”, and on Bravo! (Canada) in “FLicKeR.” Geiger was born in Ithaca, New York, and studied history at the University of Alberta. He spent three field seasons in the Arctic as historical investigator for the Knight Archeological Project, a scientific investigation of the 1719 James Knight Expedition disaster. He is Editorial Board Editor at The Globe and Mail, and a Senior Fellow at Massey College, University of Toronto, as well as being a Governor of the Royal Canadian Geographical Society and a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society. He received the Queen’s Golden Jubilee Medal.