Review: Brenda E. Smith's Becoming Fearless

One of the nicest things ever said to me was "Kaki, you're always on the brink of another adventure." It's true. I've been to dozens of countries on five continents and plan years in advance for my great trips. I've stayed in swanky hotels in the UK and fine dining in Japan, but I also remember the hard-earned thrill of seeing Macchu Pichu after a five-day hike and how I felt finishing a week-long hike with heat exhaustion in Austria.

I love reading about adventurers almost as much as I love being one myself, so when I was offered the audiobook of Brenda E. Smith's Becoming Fearless: Finding Courage in the African Wilderness, I jumped at the chance to listen.

This book is the kind of whirlwind chronicle of the unexpected that Bill Bryson's A Walk in the Woods tried to be. Our protagonist begins as a functionary on the business side of a guided tour company, then trains and certifies to be a guide herself. When offered the chance to take an amazing trip, she dreams of Alaska and is instead invited to twelve days of rafting and hiking in Tanzania. Rather than huddle around a fire in a frigid wilderness, she discovers how sunburned her lips can get, battles Acute Mountain Sickness on Kilimanjaro, and weaves a story so nerve-wracking that only the fact that this is a memoir kept me from believing that she would die in a horrific elephant stampede or hippo attack. Even anecdotes about taking a bus on her own were cause for anxiety.

The strength of the book is its timelessness and relatability. I can't say I've ever had to find a way through a herd of hippopotami, but I have had to very carefully thread my way between a family of elk. Her story of meeting a man in a back alley to buy some traditional clothing reminded me of haggling with vendors in Istanbul. On the other hand, I could not imagine myself as being brave enough to stay very still when wild animals decided to roam through my campsite.

I got to the end of Smith's trip to Tanzania and wanted to look up the price of taking such a tour and how long I'd need to get in shape. Her epilogue on the toll global warming and poaching has taken on the zoological stars of this book was heartbreaking. We learn at the end that it has been forty years since this life-changing journey and it is no longer possible to experience the wonder, awe, and terror that she described throughout the story.

Any fan of the wider world would be well-served by picking this up in any format.