The Bear Grylls Survival Manual (Mens Journal – 04/06/09)
It’s rough out there, so who better to teach us how to endure – and thrive – than TV’s best-known survivalist? Disclaimer: We don’t recommend a diet of raw snakes and goat
As the superfit daredevil host of the Discovery Channel’s hit show Man vs. Wild, Bear Grylls has run Class V rapids in the lower Zambezi (without a raft); plunged naked beneath the ice of a frozen lake in Siberia; twisted and shimmied out of quicksand in Utah; evaded alligators on a slog through the Everglades; and, most famously, eaten a vast array of utterly repulsive vermin he has dug out of rotting trees, caught slithering underfoot, or squeezed from animal scat. Yet if there’s one thing that distinguishes Man vs. Wild from the burgeoning field of shows featuring manly and slightly deranged prime-time adventurers, it’s that even when he is throttled by the most difficult terrain or choking down rhino beetle larvae, Grylls appears, against all reason, to be having a blast. The 34-year-old exudes so much enthusiasm, in fact, that it’s easy to discount the very real danger he puts himself in, or to forget that he earned his bona fides as an adventurer long before becoming a TV personality.