Nonfiction Book Reviews

Deep Survival: Who Lives, Who Dies, and Why by Laurence Gonzales is, as far as I know, the only book I’ve read and reviewed for this site because I’ve had to.  Well, I had to read it for my honors class at college - I guess I didn’t have to review it also, but what would be the fun in that?

Anyway, Deep Survival is probably not a book I’d normally just pick up and read, mostly because I haven’t ever focused on survival books before.  But after reading this one, I’ve decided that I’ve been missing out - it seems like there are some extremely interesting stories in the survival genre, and I’ll probably start picking up some books on the subject, starting with Adrift (a book that Gonzales talks about some in Deep Survival.)  So it was good for me to read something outside of my “normal” comfort zone!

Deep Survival is not what you’d think - it isn’t a book about how to survive out in the wilderness, and it isn’t simply a retelling of the stories of people who have lived through extreme conditions (although there is a lot of that in there).  Instead, it approaches survival from a psychological perspective - why is it that a well-trained Ranger would drown in a river while a five-year-old girl who is lost out in the wilderness would live for days?  Or why would a scuba diver pull off his mask while deep in the ocean, when the air tank was more than half full?

It all comes down to the mind, and things like “emotional bookmarks” and “cortisol in the hippocampus.” It was quite fascinating to find out that there was a rational reason for people behaving irrationally.

The style of writing is very poetic - he is almost lyrical at points.  It isn’t a writing style I normally encounter, so I found myself slowing down in order to understand what he was trying to say, instead of tearing through the book at break-neck speed like I normally do.

Here’s a good example of the writing style:

There goes another one now - ka-chunk-whoosh! - in a sleet storm of metal particles and this amazing hissing scream like someone’s tearing a hole in hell.  Then two angry afterburner eyes seem to hang motionless in the darkness, as the bat shape shinnies up a pigtail of smoke and is gone.
Deep Survival, page 23

I’ll admit it - I like being able to read stuff at break-neck speed.  It means I sure get through books a lot faster. So the writing style took some getting used to, but by the end, I was enjoying it.  It was probably a good thing I slowed down - there is so much in Deep Survival to digest that I suggest that you read it in small chunks if you end up picking it up.  This is definitely not what I would term a “fast read” nor a “read it and forget it” type of book.

Deep Survival made me rethink things I had done in the past, and realize why I did what I did. Case in point: A couple of summers ago, I was tubing down a river with my siblings when I got caught on a submerged log and was flipped out of my innertube.

All rational thought fled my brain, and I screamed my lungs out. I couldn’t get a grip on the river floor because the current was too fast, and I was sure I was going to get sucked into a whirlpool and die. For whatever reason, my brain took this as a good reason to scream. Maniacally. If I had spent half as much energy trying to get back into the innertube as I did screaming, I probably would have been fine. But no, I was completely and utterly panicked, and I could think of nothing but bellowing, as loud and as long as I could.

My brother eventually got over to me and helped me back into my innertube, but it wasn’t until hours later that I calmed down.  I was in a literal state of shock all that time.  Well, when I read the book, I realized something sobering: If I am ever caught in a really bad situation, I am not likely to live. The people who live are able to keep calm, cool, and collected, and are able to think rationally under extreme pressure. I am none of the above, and cannot think at all under extreme pressure, let alone rationally. Go me.

If you enjoy survival stories, if you like a poetic style of writing, and/or if you like discovering what makes the human mind tick, then you’ll thoroughly enjoy this book. I give Deep Survival 4.5 out of 5 stars.

Hava