True Survival

Award-winning Hilary McKay brings the childhood of Victorian heroine Grace Darling to life in this heartfelt reimagining of her life up to and including the Forfarshire shipwreck. Grace Darling nearly drowned when she was eight years old, leaving her with a fear of boats and the sea. But it’s...

A roller-coaster collection of true short stories that follow a young man searching for sincere adventure along the tops of freight trains and mountain ranges. The danger can be nausea-inducing while he hangs on a single flexing hold of sandstone hundreds of feet off the ground or attempts to skirt the sexual advances of a meth-smoking trucker while hitchhiking through the middle of nowhere. Between the many gripping scenes, his debasing humor acknowledges the foolishness in the romance of it all.

It was one of the strangest sights the Coast Guard pilots had ever seen: a tall-masted wooden ship, the kind that sailed centuries ago, capsizing in the wind and towering waves of Hurricane Sandy off the coast of North Carolina. It looked like something out of a movie - and, in a way, it was. The ship was the Bounty, a replica of a British merchant vessel of the same name whose crew famously mutinied in 1789. She had been built for a Marlon Brando film in the 1960s - and now she was sinking, her 16-person crew fleeing into the sea amid the splintered wood and torn canvas.

Yuna was just an eight-year-old girl when she experienced total devastation. Growing up in the Mongolian countryside, she wasn't ready to face the darker side of the world. And yet she had to. After she was kidnapped by an organized crime gang, Yuna had to overcome her fears at an early age and start taking care of herself. She tried to escape from slavery, but everybody that she encountered wanted to take advantage of her.

Frank X. Walker sees many supposed survival skills as "Creative Solutions to Life’s Challenges" in his contribution to NPR's This I Believe series. This I Believe is a National Public Radio program that features Americans, from the famous to the unknown, completing the thought that begins with...