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The New Age of Adventure

Adventure magazine editor John Rasmus reflects on the new book that features his greatest hits of the decade
By Peter Potterfield - September 24th, 2009
Editor's Note: 

It was announced on Friday, December 4, 2009, that National Geographic Adventure magazine will cease publication, the victim of a bad economy in the publishing business. The closure of Adventure makes this editor with Rasmus, who reflects on the 10-year run of the publication, conducted in September, even more timely.

 For John Rasmus, editor in chief of National Geographic Adventure magazine since its inception 10 years ago, that first decade has represented everything he hoped it would be: a showcase of the best work by today’s finest writers. If he had a frustration it was the limitations of the monthly magazine genre itself. But with the release of the book, The New Age of Adventure, he has managed to circumvent even that. 

“One of the frustrations in being a magazine editor,” Rasmus told GreatOutdoors.com, “is that you don’t have timeliness, you don’t have the longevity, you don’t have the shelf life. So to put all these great pieces we’ve published between the book ends as it were, and our body of work was something we were really excited to see in book form.”
 
Rasmus calls the New Age of Adventure a collection of Adventure’s greatest hits. The book includes many of the most memorable pieces published by the magazine in its first decade of existence. Stories by Sebastian Junger, Robert Young Pelton, Peter Mattheissen, Philip Caputo, David Roberts and many others give the 430-page collection real weight.
 
“I am very proud of this book and the collection of pieces we had,” Rasmus told me. “These are stories that the mainstream media, focused on a tight news cycle, often doesn’t get, often can’t get. And yet they are so illuminating, describing how people live their lives and react to extreme situation in really far flung and exciting places. We feel that these are special and memorable, even important stories that truly do transcend that monthly expiration date.”
 
With the anniversary of 9-11 recently noted, Rasmus pointed to several stories relevant to that watershed event, such as Sbastian Junger’s profile of Afghan warlord Ahmed Shah Massoud before he was assassinated, and Robert Pelton Young’s reporting on how Afghanistan was liberated from the Taliban.
 
“Massoud was a great guerrilla fighter prior to 9/11,” Rasmus said, “and Junger’s piece was a great story. But I’m sure a lot of people didn’t get to read it at the time. And on that same theme is Robert Young Pelton’s story of ‘Heavy D and the Boys,’ about a group of CIA and special forces operatives who came into Afghanistan under cover and linked up with the warlord general Dostum and proceeded to liberate Afghanistan from the Taliban in the fall and winter in 2001.
 
“These are both important stories, milestone pieces of journalism post 9/11, and yet, if you didn’t happen to be a subscriber eight years ago, they might have passed you by. The New Age of Adventure remedies that.”
 
Rasmus, who has been editing magazines for more than three decades, and also served as editor of Outside magazine and Men's Journal before leading the launch of National Geographic Adventure in 1999. As an editor, Rasmus told GreatOutdoors.com he’s more comfortable working in the background.
 
“As an editor,” he said, “I’m temperamentally more comfortable working behind the scenes. I see my role as a facilitatior for the real talent at work, writers like Phil Caputo and David Roberts. For me, the book project was interesting. It’s both fun and satisfying to look back on an entire decade of really amazing stories. The great thing about the adventure genre as a narrative form is that it does take time to tell the story. You need more than a few thousand words to describe what happened, whether it’s a particularly harrowing decent of K2, or the background of a series of elephant attacks on villager in India.
 
“Even though it represents only one thematic strand of what we do as a magazine—we still pride ourselves on the practical, actionable information we print every month--we love to run long-form journalistic pieces such as the ones in The New Age of Adventure."
 
Long time readers of Adventure have become accustomed to reading these pieces in the context of the magazine rich graphics and striking images. One of the surprises of the book is that the pieces hold up without those elements.
 
“The way I see it,” Rasmus said, “is that the book works really well without those things. There are no photos, other distractions go away, and you can lose yourself in the pure quality of the story telling.”
 
The New Age of Adventure, available now from National Geographic Books, contains stories that do more than paint a portrait of the world's most extreme and fascinating environments—they also explore important questions about adventure in the 21st century. These pieces take the reader across the roof of the world on the new high-speed railway in Tibet, describe the tension between Indian farmers and the sacred elephants besieging their villages, and introduce them to a shaman whom some believe can cure the most serious depressions. It’s a collection that reminds us what’s special about Adventure magazine.
 
 

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