The Lost Book of Adventure by The Unknown Adventurer
The Lost Book of Adventure is a children’s guide to exploring the wilderness. It covers how to make a forest shelter, read a topographical map, which foliage makes the best bedding. But it is not a dry guide. There’s an alchemy to its components which makes it persuasive and galvanising. The ruse is that old diaries were found in a hut deep in the Amazon. The diaries contained accounts of thrilling adventures, nature sketches, and wilderness survival instructions addressed to two children - A and L. These diaries were found by trekker Teddy Keen, restored, and compiled into this very book.
The book’s core assumption is that children will go on these adventures: that they will build woodland dens, tie clove hitches, identify wild boar tracks, make bedouin tents from bedsheets, bake flatbread on twiggy fires, and scout river shallows for glimmers of gold. And that’s the magic of the book: it has fundamental confidence in the capabilities of the child and it whips up a sense of imminent possible adventure.
The instructions are clear and minutely, beautifully illustrated. I now feel completely capable of lashing together salvaged pallets and plastic bottles to make a raft - with a mainsail, daggerboard, and two hand-hewn paddles. I know where to put the boom, how many bottles will carry my weight, which side of the river to travel up, and which watercraft has right of way. I know how to use sticks to make an igloo, and - my favourite - an origami dinner bowl from a piece of birch bark.
Interspersed throughout the wilderness guidance are excerpts from the journals of The Unknown Adventurer. He cycles 6,000 miles through Africa, sketches birds in Papua, and confronts a bushmaster in Guyana. From these glimpses, a personality appears: the adventurer is observant and resourceful; he has a gentle, sly humour and reverence for the big picture: “It’s often only in the wild that the full meaning and enormity of the universe dawns on us.”
The Lost Book of Adventure reminded me of my own expeditions: searching for the enormous Rafflesia flower in Sumatra, cutting bamboo into teacups, rafting into the heart of Borneo, becoming lost and dehydrated in an Albanian forest - I could have used The Lost Book … on that trip.
Does this all sound too daredevil? This morning my toddlers followed the instructions on how to make sleeping bags from duvets and bedsheets and now they are lost in an imaginary world of campsites and wild teddy bears.
In short, I loved this book. I’d recommend it for all children and parents, but also for illustrators, scout leaders, teachers, anyone with wilderness in their soul, and anyone who wants to reconnect with the outdoors - even if only from their armchair.
Many thanks to The Quarto Group and NetGalley for this advanced reading copy.
Note to me: Ernest Hemingway’s The Old Man and The Sea is included as the example of “a good book” under Camp Wild Equipment (p.41).
Details
The Lost Book of Adventure by The Unknown Adventurer
Published by Frances Lincoln Children’s Books, The Quarto Group; 2019
ISBN: 978-1-78603-296-6
Genres: Outdoors, Children’s Nonfiction, Nonfiction, How-to, Outdoor activities, Nonfiction, Illustration
