Deep Survival: Who Lives, Who Dies, and Why by Laurence Gonzales Summary and Reviews
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Book Reviews of Deep Survival: Who Lives, Who Dies, and Why
Book Review: Extraordinary
Summary: 5 Stars
If you would like to know which qualities of character you'd like to cultivate ,that will enhance your ability to withstand the crucible of nature, this book will help you. Even if you don't participate or have any interest in outdoor activities it also has a broader appeal, in that embodied in each chapter you'll find life lessons that transend just survival. It is a thoroughly enjoyable and insightful book. Book Review: Hit Me the Wrong Way
Summary: 1 Stars
The few themes of this book (summarized by other reviewers) could have been covered in an essay - expanding the essay to a book made it extremely repetitive. I then thought about why the author expanded it. To me (and it may not be true for others, we all bring a unique perspective to the world) it struck me that the book was simply a vehicle for the author's self-aggrandizement. The author joked with the Rangers; he biked with Lyle Lovett; etc. Does the name-dropping really help to get his message across? Other authors who have written about thrusting themselves into experiences so they could relate them to others who would never otherwise experience them (for instance, George Plimpton) did not talk down to the reader or take themselves seriously -- this author, on the other hand, takes himself way too seriously, and I felt he was talking down to me. A final nit was, the stories about rock climbing, for those of us who have never done it, and for whom the physics is not all that clear, could have benefited from illustrations -- I found it too hard to follow what was going on. But this was simply another manifestation of the major flaw described above -- the technical details could have been left out and the message would still have gotten across, but our author had to include this detail because to do it that way he could demonstrate his superiority to the reader. Actually, to get the major takeaways from the book (which I do not disagree are valid and valuable), all one needs to do is to read the reviews here, and skip the book entirely.Book Review: fascinating
Summary: 4 Stars
I really enjoyed this book. Once I started reading it, I really couldn't put it down. I did skim through some (but not most) of the chaos/systems theory sections on my first read-through, and I went back to re-read some of the more dramatic sections, too, to try to picture the events, especially in the mountain-climbing scenario. I've been going on some boy scout outings with my twin sons, and we recently went canoeing in the wilderness for a week. It wasn't exactly an aircraft carrier, but I was making some comparisons as I was reading. (For some people, a camping trip is a survival situation.) Fun and quick summer read, for generally literate and curious folks.Book Review: rocked me to my core
Summary: 5 Stars
I like reading negative reviews before buying since I find them the most honest and interesting, but after reading this book I don't understand where the negative reviewers are coming from. Maybe this is the kind of book that just hits some people hard and not others. Certainly it is not a reality-tv treatment of sensationalist disaster stories. Is that what some readers feel is missing? This book is a very thoughtful study of who survives and why. I hope I am never in a position similar to some of the courageous people in this book; nonetheless I reflect on their "survivor characteristics" regularly and have applied several of them to my daily life. I will never be quite the same after reading this book.Book Review: Something off about this...
Summary: 2 Stars
I love natural disaster genre, but this book fell flat for me. Offering some Zen insights, and a few badly narrated but intriguing case studies, the author's voice kept intervening in strange and ultimately annoying ways, which is perhaps why I didn't really like the book: I found the author's voice annoying. Deep Survival is really more about Gonzales' father than surviving, per se, and he seems to have used the trope of survival to offer a meditation on his Dad's spectacular survival in WW2, which is fine is you want a father memoir, or a WW2 experience, but rather less so if you are more interested in case studies than Pater Gonzales or the author's own masculinist excesses, which were often annoying and badly narrated. In the end, this is memoir-cum-vanity autobiography. I was expecting something more interesting.