Lawrence of Arabia: My Journey in Search of T.E. Lawrence is the first biography I’ve read in which the author explains what it’s like to kill a man: “I had often shot at people hundreds of yards away — vague shapes behind rocks who were busy firing back — but never before had I seen a man’s soul in his eyes, sensed his vitality as a fellow human, and then watched his body ripped apart at the pressure of my finger.”

But Ranulph Fiennes is not a typical biographer. Fiennes, a distant cousin of the Hollywood actor Ralph, is something close to a household name in his native Britain, where he is frequently described as “the world’s greatest living explorer.” His exploits merit the title. Fiennes has no fingers on his left hand because, in 2000, he suffered frostbite during a failed solo attempt to walk to the North Pole. (After returning to England, he amputated the necrotic bits himself in his shed using a power saw.) In 1969, he piloted a hovercraft 4,000 miles up the Nile. From 1979-1982, he led a two-man expedition to complete the first, and to date only, surface circumnavigation of the Earth across the North and South poles. In 1993, he and a collaborator became the first men to cross Antarctica on foot, unsupported. In 2003, four months after suffering a heart attack, Fiennes ran seven marathons on seven continents in seven days.