A Georgetown University physics professor describes the rigidly scheduled and isolated existence he led before embarking on a life-risking effort to climb the world's highest mountains and surf every ocean.

"Fanny Bullock Workman was a complicated and restless woman who defied the rigid Victorian morals she found as restrictive as a corset. With her frizzy brown hair tucked under a topee, Workman was a force on the mountain and off. Instrumental in breaking the British stranglehold on Himalayan mountain climbing, this American woman climbed more peaks than any of her peers, became the first woman to map the far reaches of the Himalayas, the first woman...

"Cory Richards has done it all: he's stood at the top of the world, climbed imposing mountain faces alone in the dark, kayaked 1,000 miles of the Australian coast, and become the only American to summit an 8,000 meter peak in winter. Through the course of a tumultuous life, Richards has learned to expose himself to the most extreme situations in order to quiet the chaos within--to risk his life in order to save it. Growing up in the small ski town...

Annie Smith Peck is one of the most accomplished women of the twentieth century that you have never heard of. Peck was a scholar, educator, writer, lecturer, mountain climber, suffragist, and political activist. She was a feminist and an independent thinker who refused to let gender stereotypes stand in her way. Peck gained fame in 1895 when she first climbed the Matterhorn at the age of forty-five - not for her daring alpine feat, but because she...