Deep Survival: Who Lives, Who Dies, and Why | 
 enlarge | Author: Laurence Gonzales
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Category: Book
List Price: $14.95
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Avg. Customer Rating:  131 reviews
Sales Rank: 2437
Media: Paperback
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 318
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.6
Dimensions (in): 8 x 5.4 x 0.9
ISBN: 0393326152
Dewey Decimal Number: 613.69
EAN: 9780393326154
ASIN: 0393326152
Publication Date: October 30, 2004
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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Shipping: International shipping available
Condition: The text is clean with some moderate exterior wear.
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| Editorial Reviews:
Book Description
"Unique among survival books...stunning...enthralling. Deep Survival makes compelling, and chilling, reading."—Penelope Purdy, Denver Post After her plane crashes, a seventeen-year-old girl spends eleven days walking through the Peruvian jungle. Against all odds, with no food, shelter, or equipment, she gets out. A better-equipped group of adult survivors of the same crash sits down and dies. What makes the difference? Examining such stories of miraculous endurance and tragic death—how people get into trouble and how they get out again (or not)—Deep Survival takes us from the tops of snowy mountains and the depths of oceans to the workings of the brain that control our behavior. Through close analysis of case studies, Laurence Gonzales describes the "stages of survival" and reveals the essence of a survivor—truths that apply not only to surviving in the wild but also to surviving life-threatening illness, relationships, the death of a loved one, running a business during uncertain times, even war. Fascinating for any reader, and absolutely essential for anyone who takes a hike in the woods, this book will change the way we understand ourselves and the great outdoors.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 126 more reviews...
fascinating July 9, 2008
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.
 rocked me to my core June 30, 2008
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.
 Something off about this... June 16, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
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.
Could be Classified a "Self-Help" Book June 14, 2008
As a recent "survivor" of several close family member's death's in the last few years, I felt this book is a "how-to" survive any of life's ordeals. When we suffer traumatic events - we become "lost", our world doesn't make sense anymore. The "map" to our life is altered. We try to "bend the map" to have it make sense, but when we do this - we keep going deeper into the wilderness and get more lost. This book reminded me of my own "survival" story (which still unfolds) - I felt the accounts of being lost in the woods or at sea, were analogies to my own life's circumstances (death/loss). When lost, we need to accept we are lost - then adapt. This is the work of grieving as well. One can read all the feel good grieving books they want on how to honor their loved one (and that is a good thing - it has it's place), but at the end of the day; to survive you need to accept and adapt to your "new map". I recommend this book to anyone who wants a compelling account of survival as a good read and to those who have suffered trauma in life as a guide in "getting out of the woods".
fantastic book June 2, 2008
I couldn't believe that I couldn't put this book down.
Full disclosure -I also read it at a time when I was totally obsessed with the great depression and WWII, after having watched all of Ken Burns' piece...
Yes, it is full of technical mountaineering type terms, half of which I didn't know and don't care to learn further about, but it was still fascinating to me. It gives a little more meat the the 'right stuff' factor of a survive and thrive mindset at large. If you're a life lesson concepts / big picture kinda sort, it's a really good read. And if you always have a swiss army knife on your key chain, bandaids in your purse and a mylar blanket packed along with trailmix and water in the trunk of your car, you also might like it.
But there also are crazy stories to follow where you can't imagine how someone ended up alive that make it interesting, too, if you are only in it for the donner-party-type plot...
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