Starting with Ben's first near-death experience--in a Nazi-themed bar in wartime Yugoslavia--High Risk is a whirlwind tour of everything from service in the SAS, combat in Iraq, and encounters with a gambling-obsessed 9/11 hijacker, to veterans blissed out on MDMA, hook-ups in the world of extreme sex, and battling a heroin habit on a remote Scottish island.

The difference between Burroughs Junkie and todays is perhaps the absence then of trying to explain this as some type of pathology or product of trauma and therefore subsequent lack of agency. It's difficult to even review, as this was probably the most brutally honest book I have read or listened to at least in a long time. This book will become a classic of the genre and should be read by anyone with an interest in risk, war, drugs, addiction, belief, re-wiring the mind, how the mind works under stress, deeply embedded psychological pain and the points where those areas intersect. Rarely have I felt such a suspense and relief and got to live through things being thankful at the same time that it's just a book and I don't need to do the things myself.The guy who wrote this describes himself as an arsehole early on, but even arseholes can be interesting when they're talking about something they have specialist knowledge of which others don't. Although vaccination against SARS-CoV-2 is considered the central strategy against the pandemic, uptake lags behind target rates. A friend once told a horrific story about dealing with a colleague’s vehicle, which had been hit with an EFP charge,” says Timberlake, referring to an explosively formed penetrator – a device that became known as a “ superbomb”, and did serious damage in Iraq and elsewhere.

Suddenly he was a real addict, unable to kick it with his life slowly beginning to revolve round the acquisition and use cycle where everything makes sense because, well, heroin. a smorgasbord of fascinating topics told in a laugh out loud style mixed with genuinely moving prose. During his talk Ben will recount exploits from his book, High Risk, an odyssey fuelled by adrenalin addiction. It seems to have driven his quest to propel himself into situations most avoid; there is much more in High Risk besides the war stories.The first thing I can think of is Pain and Gain, an equally wacky but wholly compelling story of nonfiction that makes you doubt what you are seeing, or hearing in this case. This is a dark, raw and uncompromising tale of the human condition in extremis, drawing on the many lives of Ben Timberlake: as an archaeologist, Special Forces soldier, combat medic and drug addict. This is Graham Greene or Joseph Conrad for the Ecstasy generation: Apocalypse Now for the 21st Century.