Book Review: Letters From the Edge

Exploration has often been told as a heroic tale of conquest, all flag planting and tweed jackets braving the unknown. So when I picked up advance proofs of a new book published in collaboration with The Explorers Club, built around letters and personal stories from “explorers” rather than adventurers, I wasn’t sure what to expect.

The Explorers Club Presents: Letters From the Edge, edited by Jeff Wilser, brings together a wide range of explorers’ (in a loose sense of the word) voices, through their letters, journals, blog posts, and even tweets. The result is a collection that reveals the edges of human experience as they are lived in remote or hazardous places. That’s messy, uncertain, and often deeply personal.

The book is arranged thematically rather than chronologically, organised into sections such as The Edge of the Known World, The Edge of Knowledge, The Edge of Survival, The Edge of Culture, The Edge of Humanity, The Edge of Boundaries, and The Edge of the Universe. This structure brings together stories from different centuries and disciplines, linking a classic polar expedition to a Mars rover’s “letters home,” or rainforest field notes to isolated work on an Antarctic base.

One of the most memorable sections** for me is the chapter on Meg Lowman’s “The Eighth Continent.” Lowman, a biologist in the 1970s, pushed past her fear of heights to ascend into the unstudied rainforest canopy using improvised climbing rigs. Her discovery of a thriving, little-studied ecosystem, housing the majority of Earth’s biodiversity, was quite ground breaking. Perhaps the greatest legacy of her contribution though was the opening up of the treetops to others through canopy walkways, ensuring that the canopy was not just for the few but for the many.

A canopy walkway in Malaysia. Photo: Canopymeg.com

I also really enjoyed the opening passage which focused on the sad and infamous tale of Ada Blackjack and her eight month survival ordeal on Wrangel Island. The author Jeff Wilser didn’t hold back on laying bare former Explorers Club president Vilhjalmur Stefansson’s questionable role in the whole saga. It’s a tale familiar to many with an interest in arctic travel, but not one I had previously read about in much depth.

The collection is particularly strong in representing female explorers. Figures like Donna Oliver, who endured the psychological weight of Antarctic winter as a female on an all-male science base, or Tanya Harrison, who wrote about her work on NASA’s Mars rover “Oppy,” are presented not as token voices but as being important to the narrative of modern exploration. These stories served as a neat reminder that “the edge” is not only a physical frontier but also a social or societal one.

The book is not without fault, though few ever are. The “letters” angle the book takes, stretching from handwritten notes to blog posts and holograms, can feel a bit inconsistent. Some of the explorers stories end a little soon, but that may well be because the available material was limited. The sheer variety of voices, while impressive, sometimes comes at the cost of cohesion, so the anthology occasionally feels more like a sampler than a sustained exploration of each sections theme. Having said that, the book works really well if like me grazing is your style. You can just pick it up and jump to any chapter without needed to read the previous text.

These minor points aside, the book works, it shows why exploration continues to matter. Not as a tally of physical triumphs over nature, thankfully, but as a way to confront uncertainty, stretch resilience, broaden knowledge and attitudes, and experience awe.

Letters From the Edge doesn’t offer a single definition of what “the edge” is. Instead, it gathers a chorus of perspectives. For readers interested in endurance, curiosity, and discovery - not only those who identify as adventure or exploration enthusiasts - this collection I think offers plenty to engage and inspire in an easy read format.

Published by Random House USA Inc, Letters From the Edge will be released on October 28, 2025.

** The Meg Lowman story inspired me to write this recent piece on tree climbing in Costa Rica, based on an interview with Noah Kane: Climbing Giant Trees in Costa Rica’s Cloud Forest