Deep Survival: Who Lives, Who Dies, And Why

Deep Survival is the kind of book serious editors cringe through.

It's a bizarre, wandering mess. Gonzalez can't just tell a story and stick with the story, then do the play by play and summary.

Every step of the way he interrupts the narrative and tries to offer connections and resemblances. I lost it when he threw in a reference to Winston Smith in Orwell's 1984, declaring Smith lost his will to survive because he failed to maintain his humanity. Or something that banal and totally irrelevant.

I wanted a nuts and bolts survival overview. Gonzales wants to do something far more ambitious, a philosophical overview of the existential art of survival.
But it comes out poorly.

Not worth reading, really.

The Psychology of Being Lost and of Surviving - Book Review of Deep Survival by Laurence Gonzales - 2004

About the Author - Other books, an upcoming "Everyday Survival" to be released later in 2008.

Overview

This book recounts stories of being lost at sea, lost in the wilderness, mountain climbing accidents, Apollo moonshot, firefighting, and other high risk situations. One thing that is great is both telling stories of those who lived and those who died.

The stories are gripping and while ultimately there is an attempt at summary at the end, a more loose set of concepts emerge which are not available in summary form. In particular there is the notion of "secondary emotions" (which can be both positive and negative). The discussion is not ultimately fulfilling or complete, but definitely interesting. The kind of training that experience and perception generates and recalls (sometimes inappropriately).

There is a bit of repetition in this book. The same stories are referred to at different points throughout. In many cases without benefit, though sometimes this is needed as different themes are present in the same stories.

These criticisms should not dissuade the reader, as this is an excellent book, and truly engages one in thinking about survival in extreme circumstances, and also how situations and environments can quickly become extreme.

However, this book has a more fundamental mission (which comes through most clearly when the author is discussing his father, which happens often). This book really can be considered nothing less than a modern day introduction to stoic philosophy. Marcus Aurelius, Herodotus, and most often Epictetus figure prominently throughout.

A worthwhile read.

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.

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.

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.