UBC: Gonzales, Deep Survival

[truepenny]

Deep Survival: Who Lives, Who Dies, and Why by Laurence Gonzales

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This is a fascinating book about how accidents happen, why people get lost, and how and why some people survive and others don't. Gonzales is also working through some massive daddy issues about his larger-than-life WWII veteran father, who survived being shot down by the Germans and went on to be a biomedical Ph.D. researcher, issues which have driven him, the son, to do all sorts of crazy things in search of the "cool" his father possesses. ("Cool" in the jazz sense of "be cool," although it also tends to translate in action into "cool" in that other sense of awesome and imitation-worthy.) Cool, says Gonzales, or the ability to keep a balance between your rational brain and your emotions in crisis situations, is a lot of what makes one person a survivor and another one not. Humor helps. Also empathy. People are more likely to survive if they are trying to help someone else, or if there's someone in their life they are trying to get back to

Gonzales backs up his ideas with a lot of neuroscience and a lot of closely analyzed examples, and I think he's more right than not, although I think some of his conclusions, such as that seeking out risk marks you as a survivor, are a little self-serving, since he himself is clearly an adrenaline junkie of the first water. Also, some of his own examples contradict that, like the Army Ranger captain who drowned on a commercial rafting tour. I could totally be persuaded that seeking out risk is good practice for crisis and that because you have practiced you are more likely to be able to achieve the state of cool you need ... but that's not quite what Gonzales says.

Overall, though, this is an excellent book, beautifully and thoughtfully written. Gonzales owns his daddy issues and in fact they make the book personal and empathizable in a way that a simple study of crisis and survival would not be. One of the best takeaways from the book is the Rules of Life Gonzales and his six-year-old daughter came up with:

1. Be here now.
2. Everything takes eight times as long as it's supposed to.

These seem to me like rules to live by.



View all my reviews

Comments

[sovay]

1. Be here now.
2. Everything takes eight times as long as it's supposed to.

I really like that.

[mekare]

Thank you for all these book reviews. This one sounds especially interesting and I love the two rules for life :-) Though I'd add John Finnemore's as well

3. Be kind.
4. Have fun.

[larryhammer]

I've had this for a couple years but still haven't gotten to it. *bumps up the TBR pile*