For years as an award-winning war reporter, Sebastian Junger traveled to many front lines and frequently put his life at risk. Yet the closest he ever came to death was the summer of 2020 while spending a quiet afternoon with his wife and two young children. Crippled by abdominal pain, Junger was rushed to the hospital by ambulance. Once there, he began slipping away. As blackness encroached, he was visited by his dead father, inviting Junger to join him. That was the last thing Junger remembered until he came to the next day when he was told he had suffered a ruptured aneurysm that he should not have survived. This experience spurred Junger --- a confirmed atheist raised by his physicist father to respect the empirical --- to undertake a scientific, philosophical and deeply personal examination of mortality and what happens after we die.

Sebastian Junger examines the tension that lies at the heart of what it means to be human. For much of a year, Junger and three friends --- a conflict photographer and two Afghan War vets --- walked the railroad lines of the East Coast. It was an experiment in personal autonomy, but also in interdependence. Dodging railroad cops, sleeping under bridges, cooking over fires, and drinking from creeks and rivers, the four men forged a unique reliance on one another. In FREEDOM, Junger weaves his account of this journey together with primatology and boxing strategy, the history of labor strikes and Apache raiders, the role of women in resistance movements, and the brutal reality of life on the Pennsylvania frontier.

Combining history, psychology and anthropology, Sebastian Junger’s latest book explores what we can learn from tribal societies about loyalty, belonging and the eternal human quest for meaning. It explains the irony that --- for many veterans as well as civilians --- war feels better than peace, adversity can turn out to be a blessing, and disasters are sometimes remembered more fondly than weddings or tropical vacations. TRIBE explains why we are stronger when we come together, and how that can be achieved even in today's divided world.

Journalist Sebastian Junger spent the better part of a year embedded with a combat platoon in Afghanistan. With WAR, he returns with an intense and unflinching look at the almost inhuman difficulty of the task they face and the bonds that compel them to perform it.

October 1991. It was "the perfect storm" --- a tempest that may happen only once in a century. Creating waves ten stories high and winds of 120 miles an hour, the storm whipped the sea to inconceivable levels few people on Earth have witnessed. Except for the six-man crew of the Andrea Gail, a commercial fishing boat tragically headed towards the storm's hellish center.