Eye Opener Press
Featured Author - Brenda E Smith
Becoming Amazed
Available early December 2024
Don’t just read about adventure—experience it.
Brenda’s adventure memoir, Becoming Amazed, will sweep you off your feet and plunge you into a world where the thrill of the unknown reigns supreme. Her journey began with a heart-pounding initiation—rafting and mountain climbing through the untamed Tanzanian wilderness chronicled in her book Becoming Fearless: Finding Courage in the African Wilderness. What started as a step outside her comfort zone soon became an insatiable quest for the extraordinary, pushing her to explore some of the most remote and breathtaking corners of the globe.
From Bolivia’s rugged landscapes to Ethiopia’s hidden tribal territories, from the enigmatic villages of Pakistan to the leech-infested forests of Sri Lanka, Brenda’s escapades are both awe-inspiring and terrifying. She confronts everything from a revered idol exacting mysterious revenge to navigating eerie two-dimension spaces. The stakes reach their zenith in the brutal murder of a friend by terrorists—a moment that forces Brenda to reckon with the harshest realities of the world she craves to explore.
Through every trial, Brenda gains profound insights, emerging stronger, braver, and more enlightened. Her stories are an adrenaline-packed blend of daring exploits and deep reflections, perfect for fans of Eat Pray Love, Wild, and Tracks.
Becoming Fearless
Best Non-Fiction Travel Book 2023 by Reader Views
In Becoming Fearless, Brenda Smith reluctantly embarks on a life-changing adventure, facing twelve days of rafting through a Tanzanian game reserve teeming with angry hippos, roaring lions, and stealthy crocodiles, followed by a daring climb up Africa’s tallest mountain. Amidst the extreme heat and bone-chilling cold, her greatest challenge isn’t the wilderness—it’s the courageous inner journey that transforms her.
This inspirational true story reveals what’s possible when you step out of your comfort zone and into the wild.
Praise for this book
“The fires of transformation blaze in this superbly delightful portmanteau of a book. Brenda Smith undergoes a revolution in consciousness as she warily leaves the ordinary behind, steps off the comfort train, and careens into the strange and fantastic world of rafting crocodile-infested rivers and climbs high into the African sky.” - Richard Bangs, one of Explorersweb’s 100 greatest explorers of the last 100 years
"When, in 1981 at just twenty-eight years old, Brenda Smith hesitantly accepted the challenge of a wilderness adventure rafting on treacherous rivers in a remote Tanzanian game reserve and climbing Mount Kilimanjaro, she didn't know it would be the touchstone that would transform what was, until then, her safe and contained life. In Becoming Fearless, Smith guides us on her journey of discovery, plunging us with vivid, cinematic detail into the stunning, wild landscape of Tanzania in the era before the impacts of overcrowding and commercial development marred its natural beauty, and illegal poaching decimated its animal populations. Alongside her, we face harrowing encounters with hippos, lions, and elephants; we navigate the dangerous river rapids and currents; we scale steep and treacherous mountain terrain. And all the while, we feel her growing strength stretching past her fear to take her places she'd never dreamed of going. Becoming Fearless is a stirring account of how opening ourselves to some risk has the potential of offering us abundant rewards." - Melanie Brooks, author of A Hard Silence and Writing Hard Stories
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"Becoming Fearless thoroughly immerses readers into a dramatic and isolated Tanzanian wilderness that, sadly, no longer exists. Thank goodness Brenda Smith has so vividly recreated every sensory detail from her memory and her research. You'll hear a lion's roar near your remote tent site, feel the jolts of fear when your inflatable raft is surrounded by agitated hippos, feel the aching shoulders and sun-blistered lips. You'll savor the taste of honey-drenched flapjacks and warm, crusty bread, baked in the coals of a campfire, and you'll marvel at a dazzling sunset halfway up Mt. Kilimanjaro. Smith's life-altering journey encourages readers to reach past fear and discover the wonders of the unfamiliar." - Robin Clifford Wood, author of The Field House, Best Non-fiction Book 2022 Maine Literary Awards
"In Becoming Fearless, Brenda Smith writes an adventure story from a valuable and unique point of view, that of someone resisting the adventure, rather than embracing or fetishizing it. Throughout the rather amazing journey she documents, she constantly questions her decision to be in this position, in this place, yet carries on. Ironically, it is through recognizing her limits while on Mt. Kilimanjaro that Smith discovers a true courage, and it is this courage which serves as the motivation for her later, very different types of adventures, which we learn about in an epilogue."
- Michael D. Burke is the author of The Same River Twice, and Emeritus Professor of English and Creative Writing at Colby College
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Best Amazon Rankings - Launch Week
#1 Africa Travel
#1 Survival Biographies & Memoirs
#1 Conservation
#1 AfricanTravel
#1 Environmental Issues
#1 East Africa Travel
#1 Science & Math
#4 Biographies & Memoirs
Brenda'sBlog
"She remained motionless as each one of our rafts floated by. With a regal aloofness, she observed her audience, accepting the homage we bestowed upon her. With the majesty of a benevolent queen, it seemed the lioness demanded the devotion of all creatures in the jungle kingdom she ruled."
