Books like Desperate Journeys, Abandoned Souls: True Stories of Castaways and Other Survivors

This book includes a lot of well-researched stories, but it's hindered by inconsistent writing and an annoyingly broad focus. The writing is actively confusing at times, sometimes enough to send me running to other sources for clarification.There are a lot of dry recitations of fact mixed with the occasional literary allusion. The introductions or summations of each chapter, though, include awkward attempts to contextualize the stories that seem almost laughably out-of-place when compared with the book's overall tone. (For example, Chapter 9's declaration that "All our dead heroes have been done in by Marxist historians and psychoanalytic biographers.")I'm interested in tales of shipwreck victims and castaways, so I pushed through those parts. But when the author skipped over to mountain men, I started skimming. The stories in these latter sections don't seem as carefully chosen or organized. There's an account of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry's plane crash, and it comes right after an account of Joseph Knowles, a man whose survival exploits are widely regarded to have been faked.The final part of the book consists of one very long chapter listing lots of short survival anecdotes jumbled together in chronological order, almost as if the author agrees with me that the book has already moved past its most interesting content.