In 1982, Mark Inglis and Phil Doole were high up the slopes of New Zealand's highest mountain, Aoraki Mt. Cook, when a blizzard hit.

They built an ice cave and waited for the storm to pass, but it would be 13 days before help could reach them. They survived on meagre rations, but in the cramped cave they lost circulation in their legs, which had to be amputated.

A New York Times writer Lily Koppel uncovered a long-abandoned red leather diary in the trash outside her apartment on Manhattan's Upper West Side. After reading five years of daily entries detailing exotic Manhattan life from 1929 to 1934 all through the eyes of a sophisticated 15-year-old girl who blossoms into a creative, passionate young woman Koppel put her reporting skills to work...

Amputating your arm with a blunt knife is a task the average person would find virtually inconceivable. But on May 1, 2003, it was the only option left to Aron Ralston after an 800-pound boulder fell on his arm, pinning it to a canyon wall.

Dean Karnazes ran fifty marathons in fifty states in fifty consecutive days.

Norman Ollestad was 11 years old when the plane he was in crashed, killing his father and two other passengers. The ensuing nine-hour, life-or-death descent -- in the end, he was the only survivor -- is the topic of "Crazy for the Storm: A Memoir of Survival."

On September 10, 1960, Abebe Bikila, an Ethiopian, stunned the world when he won the Rome Olympic marathon running barefoot. He was the first black African to win a gold medal at the Olympics and overnight became a sporting hero, an African hero, and, for many, the first black African they had ever heard of. Bikila was a man of his times a symbol of hope in the new Africa.