Author: Katherine Martin
ISBN: 1-57731-453-0

The following review was contributed  Kathryn Atwood Click Here To View More Of Kathryn's Reviews.

Can courage be defined?  Webster's terse attempt - "The quality of being
brave; fearlessness; valor" - doesn't  to do justice to the amazing
subjects of Katherine Martin's book, Those Who Dare: Real People, Real
Courage . . . and what we learn from them.   These people not only robustly
flesh out Webster's definition, but give full meaning to the word's root:
"cor" (Latin for "heart.")  Most of her subjects would not consider themselves brave (and many balked at the termas applied to themselves),  but all of them have real "heart," something they discovered at the center
of their being that compelled them to do amazing things.

There is Hugh Herr who, after losing his legs in a hiking accident,
refuses to accept clumsy prosthetics and invents ones that really work,
starting a company that continues to help thousands of others in his
condition.  There is Paul Cox who simultaneously saves a Samoan rainforest
and a plant that might help cure cancer.  Really.  There is Karen Gaffney,
who, despite having Down's Syndrom, takes part in a relay race across the
English channel.  And there is Debbie Williams, who risked everything to
tell the truth and who ultimately prevailed.  The subjects and their
stories are wide and varied but each is intensely inspirational.

A few things in this book distracted me from these stories.  One was
Martin's repeated attempts to cast evangelical Christians in an
unflattering light.  One particularly egregious example is found in the
story of Mark Nyberg, "The Cowboy Missionary."   She describes what appears
to have been a life-changing conversion experience for Nyberg in a few
vague sentences but in the story's epilogue spends over six paragraphs -
having nothing to do with Nyberg's courageous story but apparently
everything to do with Martin's dislike of evangelicals - detailing the
apparent mistreatment of Nyberg by his Christian brethren following his
divorce.

Aside from being offensive to evangelicals, is Martin's apparent prejudice
a problem?  Not necessarily (especially if you agree with her).  But I have
an unfortunate (and commonplace) tendency: I catagorize people and writers
when I discover their biases, which in turn distracts me from their
message.  Is Martin's purpose really to highlight courage?  Or is it to
take sideswipes at evangelicals?  How much of one and how much of the
other?  Her obvious prejudice distracted me and unfortunately made me look
at her book in a whole new light..

The other thing that distracted me from Martin's book was, well, Martin.
 She has become something of a courage guru and may be helping many people
become more courageous, but I found her attempts to classify, define, and
categorize the concept extremely distracting; I had to force myself not to
skip over her pontifications (they were extremely well written
pontifications, but were for me tediously in the way) so I could move on to
the real thing.  The beauty of her subjects is their apparent lack of
self-consciousness: they weren't trying to get their stories into a book,
they simply had a herculean task placed before them and charged ahead with
(yes ) courage.
The bravery exhibited in these stories, however, completely eclipses any
faults displayed by their collector.  Reading Those Who Dare not only
 makes you feel proud to be part of the human race, but makes you believe
that any goal, no matter how formidable, is always, always possible.