Books

Can’t Hurt Me

For David Goggins, childhood was a nightmare – poverty, prejudice, and physical abuse colored his days and haunted his nights. But through self-discipline, mental toughness, and hard work, Goggins transformed himself from a depressed, overweight young man with no future into a U.S. Armed Forces icon and one of the world’s top endurance athletes.

In Can’t Hurt Me, he shares his astonishing life story, which illuminates a path that anyone can follow to push past pain, demolish fear, and reach their full potential.

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Indolirium

Tag along on an insomnia-addled journey through the cities, villages and way out wilds of Indonesia. In 2012, I embarked on what I thought would be a painless three month assignment in a country I knew well, only to find my marriage and life threatened and my mind unravel as I groped for light in the darkness.

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One Breath

One Breath, my first narrative non-fiction book, was published by Crown Archetype (a Penguin Random House imprint) on January 12, 2016. It’s about the extreme yet poetic sport of competitive freediving and the life and death of Nicholas Mevoli, America’s greatest freediver. A blend of two of my favorite books, Into The Wild and The Wave, One Breath traces Mevoli’s life from his Florida childhood to the anti-establishment punk squats in West Philadelphia to the streets of a blooming Bohemia in Williamsburg, Brooklyn to his record breaking career in the sport he loved. Along the way we bounce between Mevoli’s life and the 2014 freediving season where we explore the sport’s greatest athletes and rivalries, and hear from pathologists and doctors researching Mevoli’s death. What they discover raises the stakes for the world’s best divers who remain compelled to risk death in order to go deeper than they ever have before.

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Dispatches from the Gulf

In April 2010, the largest offshore oil spill in U.S. history – Deepwater Horizon – put thousands of citizens in the Gulf of Mexico in jeopardy. The environment was forever changed. Today, a global team of scientists works to protect and restore one of our planet’s most valuable natural resources. Their challenge is to investigate the environmental impact of the disaster. Their goal is to learn how to cope with the effects of future oil spills.

Dispatches from the Gulf is the story of that journey.

Praise for One Breath

“One Breath could stand comfortably alongside classics of extreme-sports journalism such as Jon Krakauer’s Into Thin Air.”
-James McConnachie, The Sunday Times

“A powerful story about a dangerous, beautiful sport and an unforgettable young man. Skolnick tells his tale with passion and affection for his subject, but also with an admirable journalistic integrity. In the process, he takes us to distant worlds—underwater universes most of us will never know—where humans are challenged to the utmost limits of being.”
—Elizabeth Gilbert, #1 New York Times Bestselling author of Eat, Pray, Love and Committed

“One Breath plunges readers into a liquid kingdom of immense beauty and ever-present danger, and introduces us to the singular characters who have found themselves drawn deeper and deeper into this realm. Adam Skolnick has written a captivating, page-turning book about a world that few will ever visit, but that everyone should know.”
—Susan Casey, bestselling author of The Devil’s Teeth, The Wave and Voices in the Ocean

“Why anyone would take a deep breath and dive the depth of a football field is beyond me. Why anyone would write about the extreme sport of freediving becomes clear within the first pages of this stunning book, both an ode to freediving and a warning that the sea is deep, dark and dangerous. Skolnick’s investigation reveals the perilous passions of freediving’s elite corps, who share a poetic language of foreboding: the drop, on the line, freefall, white cards, the squeeze. He’s captured the glory and euphoria of a fast growing sport that attracts a fearless cast of misfits, yogis and rebels all drawn to the dreamy glide straight down the gullet of a column of blue turning to black. Deeply researched and beautifully written.”
—Neal Thompson, author of A Curious Man, Driving With the Devil and Light This Candle

“One Breath is a gripping heroic tragedy – it reminds us why the edge-seekers inspire us, and how we live through them, even as they break our hearts. The desire to push limits and the spiritual dimension of sport – the desire to commit and immerse ourselves to the hilt – speak powerfully to those of us who barely snorkel, much less freedive. In his portrayal of Nick Mevoli, Skolnick illuminates what it means to be young: how passion, physical vitality and innocence blur the line between brave and idiotic, inspired and crazy. Pushing the limits of human capability will always ride that line, and One Breath does a masterful job of illuminating that quest and all the love and loss around it.”
—J.C. Herz, author of Learning to Breathe Fire: The Rise of CrossFit and the Primal Future of Fitness

“Freediving is like a love affair with death— — a journey into a lightless mystery. What is it in the human heart that draws athletes toward such perilous territory? In telling the astonishing story of Nick Mevoli’s life, Adam Skolnick becomes the first writer to fully explain this sport and its insane appeal. The result is a first-rate adventure story and a deeply-reported psychological profile of a man whose urges drove him to the ultimate test of endurance.”
—Tom Zoellner, author of Uranium: War, Energy and the Rock that Shaped the World

“With echoes of Jon Kraukauer’s Into the Wild, Skolnick weaves together a portrait of a young man who died in his effort to embrace a life defined by the pursuit of what he loved. A mesmerizing and haunting tale by a very fine writer.”
—Neal Bascomb, New York Times bestselling author of The Perfect Mile and Hunting Eichmann

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Other Books: Lonely Planet

A Lonely Planet author since 2007, I’ve also written over 30 guidebooks and other titles for the world’s number one travel publisher, covering destinations as wide ranging as Indonesia and Portugal, Thailand and Nicaragua, Costa Rica and East Timor, as well as Mexico, Hawaii and a number of destinations within the continental United states.