This book is not only extremely well written, but offers much scientific insight. The stories of survival provide flavor for his text and illustrate well his concepts. What I found most surprising is the applications of survival stories to everyday life. Gonzales concludes by offering practical advice for surviving in business and personal daily life. This book far exceeded what I expected.

I was hoping for a great book about stories of survival, what they did, lessons learned and who died, and why - Like the title says. This book, however doesn't even come close to what its advertising. The narrative is chaotic and the ideas somewhat obscure. I would not recommend this book to anyone.

3 yaers ago I heard about this book from a radio announcer. Bought it and read it. Since, I have given it as a gift to many friends and colleagues. I teach a college class on brain incorporated teaching and use key ideas from this book on how the brain works. It has helped me to understand my own thinking. I have quoted from it to friends and family who have had accidents because they were in states of stress, where all the mind can think about is the destination but the surroundings, being highly important, are often neglected. Case in point, a relative, while being late to their destination, and giving instructions to their teenager out window of the car while driving, they ran over the dog. Devastated as they were I sent copies of pages from this book to them. They said the pages did ease their distress in understanding how and why these things happen when teh brain is in this state of mind. The stories in this book are unforgettable, not gruesome as one might think, and very personal. Highly recommended.

Once you start reading this book you won't be able to stop! Mr. Gonzales writing is very engaging and his story's will keep you locked into the book that you find yourself wanting to make the chapters last. Highly recommend this book to anyone who loves adventure and strives to understand the human element in nature.

Probably one of the most engaging books I've read this year. Gonzales is an amazing story-teller, bringing together harrowing stories from the headlines with the latest in brain and psychology research to make a highly entertaining book. As an avid outdoorsman myself with a few close calls, every word rings true to the real world. I savored the last few chapters, not wanting the book to come to an end.

Excellent book, different from the beaten path. I could not put it down.
I could relate from the experiences of panicking and letting your emotions out of control, it is deadly because in a survival situation you spend all your energy that way. I learned a lot on how humans behave, and what keeps you alive, and in the end what kicks in to help you until help comes!

There are clearly two ways to approach this book - one for the great stories, the other for the mindset of the people in the stories.

Personally, I found the conversation about how our minds work to be the most compelling . The idea of a plan as a "memory of the future" is a line that sticks with me.

In my work as an NLP practitioner I know that we create pictures and stories in our minds that determine what our experience of the world will be. After a dramatic experience, we decide (unconsciously) what that experience means to us. We translate each decision into behavior, without even realizing it. And our behavior determines our final outcome. In our regular lives, it may be whether we get the new job, or whether we succeed or fail in a relationship. Taken to the edge, it means do we live or do we die?

This book offers outstanding, compelling and edge-of-the-seat (or the glacier) suspenseful accounts of how our lifetime accumulation of unconscious decisions make that determination.

Current neuroscience and quantum physics give us tools to identify and then change our internal, unconscious decisions, specifically and rapidly. This book is a very important piece of personal leverage - it is a doorway into understanding the ultimate consequences of whether we choose to bring our decisions to the conscious level and set ourselves up for DEEP Survival.

Maybe I'm pretentious but this author can't seem to tell a story. This book would be fine if it were science, and great if it were story, but it tries to find some middle ground and winds up with not enough of either.

I've listened to this audio book twice and read it once. The topic is fascinating. Normally I get more from reading a book than from listening to it read. This is an exception...the audio book is well read and easier to follow than the book. I highly recommend it.

While writing a human resources / management book, I realized that many of my references did not come from the world of business but rather from diverse subject matters. Nothing in my large stack of reference material was more useful than Laurence Gonzales's book on survival.

I greatly appreciated the writing style and the pace had me finishing the book in two settings. More importantly, I was so very glad to find that the lessons in this `survival' book could be readily applied to the business arena.

The lessons in this book: be calm, be decisive and never give up, were massaged and incorporated in my work. Together with surveys provided by our military leadership in Iraq, I was able to develop a guide for management in not only how to survive but thrive in a hostile environment.

I highly recommend this book to business leaders that truly want the best for their organizations and themselves. Michael L. Gooch, SPHR Author ofWingtips with Spurs

This book is a must read for anyone who hikes or travels into the wild or beyond your own backyard. Gonzales tells a great story and helps you understand the risks when outside our civilized comfort zone. This is particularly important read for those who camp and hike and venture into the "wild".

Impressive, it exceeded expectations. I did not have great hopes of loving this book and had passed it by for years, even though the topic is right up my alley. Well, I was surprised to find this interesting, engrossing and remarkably fresh.
I'd heard all the survival stories in the book before, but the author put a fresh spin on them and kept it suspenseful. The mix of survival stories, anecdotes and psychological discussion are well-balanced.
I highly recommend this book.

This is a nonfiction book set in the framework of a thriller. Gonzales frustratingly leaves stories in suspense. He often interrupts a gripping real-life story with pages of interpretation, some of it irrelevant and forced, and all of which could have been left until after the story finished. Besides this, his connections are often pretentiously esoteric (with a lot of tenuously-related Tao Te Ching verses), and he writes about things he doesn't seem to actually understand that well. One of his theses is something about chance being a pretty small factor in survival situations, but it's an underdeveloped thesis, and doesn't convince well. Other ideas are similarly unconvincing. He uses sources only tangentially connected to his idea, and repeats himself a lot. This book could have probably been cut down to half (or less) its current size, and organized better. I learned some, but I had to piece it together for myself.

After writing this review, I thought better of it and wanted to change it to two stars, but Amazon won't let me do that in the "Edit Review" thing.

Explores engaging concepts of what makes one a survival, although it's questionable as to whether a survivor is born or made. Could do with a little less of the analysis and a few more examples.

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.

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.

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.

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".

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...

This book is outstanding and very informative for those who like to do outdoor things in the few wild places that still exist. It applies to all manner of activities and is thought provoking about life and the thinking processes of people under stress. I would recommend this book to anybody and everybody under the age of 70.

I purchased this book for my husband after hearing about it from a instructor in a CPR class I took...I told my husband about it and he wanted to order the book...it wasn't exactly what he expected it to be and after he thumbed thru it, he laid it down for servral days...well when he picked it up again, he said he couldn't put it down as the stories we very inspiring...we will be ordering it for our grandkids in the future and based on what my husband said about the book I will also be reading it...

This was an inspiring, interesting, and practical book. It's a quick read and the fundemental rules of survival are the same rules for success in business, life, relationships...staying aware, being resourceful, keep moving, dealing with reality/not pereception of how it should be or how you'd like it to be, and most importantly having faith in yourself and others. Great book for anyone.

I can't say much more about it than other posters but my final judgment on the book was that I originally checked it out at the library and liked it so much that I bought a copy for home.

Here are the REAL lessons learned by folks that weren't trained to survive in the wild, but who had survival situations thrust upon them! Whatever the life crisis; plane crash, boat sinks, avalanche, animal attack, financial disaster, health crisis - here are the rules for SURVIVAL.
Great stories and examples - with the lesson to be learned at each chapters end. Start to use these RULES and you'll avoid survival situations, but if ti happens - FUBAR/SNAFU; you'll be ready; Mentally!!

Deep Survival needs another editor. The poor literary quality makes the book awkward and irritating to read. The author's attempt apply science to survival situations is unconvincing. The author appears to be unqualified and his analysis of each situation is brief and incomplete.

If you read the book and didn't find solid points of practical application.... well, buh bye.

Laurence Gonzales has been studying the lives of survivors in extreme outdoors for over 30 years. He offers many captivating anecdotes of climbers, sea enthusiasts, fire fighters, World Trade Center victims and especially his father who he admires the most. Each account is an enjoyable lesson, covering the psychological context of surviving and the rational decisions that each person goes through while lost or in desperation to live. This is a must for nature enthusiasts.

Obviously I enjoyed deep survival; I bought copies for my son,a rock climber, and my son in law, a blue water sailor with my daughter and grandson aboard. More importantly one can generalise the concepts in the text to all things in life. The more we learn about neural function, the more we understand that intuition or "feelings" may guide us better in tough situations. Prepare, study but listen to the inner voice for a better chance of survival.

Your plane just crashed and you're stranded in the jungle with a broken leg. What's your brain doing and what are you going to do about it? Staying alive means keeping your cool. I loved this fascinating book.

Best book that I have read on surival situations. Great psychological portrayal of the working of the mind under unusual stress. Makes you think hard before acting. A good study on how to approach everyday life situations.

This is a great book. It is easy to read and full of research-based information. It makes you think more carefully about consequences. I've used the information in this book often and will return to it again.

Sebastion Junger strikes it on the books front cover -I too tore through this in a perfect storm. What must be stressed here however is that, this is deep journalism -not sensationalism. Gonzales deftly avoids exploitation, trampling a rightfully compelling subject. Packed specifically with personal and professional experience, as well as academic and field researched insight, he trains a master narrators light on the uniquely human moment of critical decision, and superior action in the face of adversity on the path of human life. The book, at it's heart, celebrates Gonzales' Survival Archetype, his father, bringing to mind the survival archetypes we all have, and can call upon in our time of deep decision. Deep Survival generously shares the written bread crumbs of it's
conclusions, and is it's self a literary trail head for personally researching literaly any deep adventure.

As some one who has engaged in many of the sports and situations mentioned in this book I found this book an excellent source of information on why I have survived an others did not.

In most cases survival is a combination of dumb luck and keeping your head when everyone else is losing theirs so you can take advantage of opportunity.

It provided me a book that I now give to others as a reason why I continue skydiving and in some cases why they survived.

Deep Survival, Who Lives, Who Dies, and Why by Laurence Gonzales is a riviting, well-told read from the inside and the outside of what makes a human being a survivor. Gonzales, trained in the military arts of paratrooping and reconnaissance, and raised in the shadow of a father who overcame fear to fly in WWII again and again and survive a fall from a plane, knows the conceptual, emotional, and practical obstacles that a human being must face in expected and unexpected danger. What sets Gonzales' book apart from others is his ability to write from the inside of what it is like to survive and at the same time from the outside, using the work and interviews of dozens of psychologists about the functioning of the brain.

Gonzales' stories broadly revolve around two scenarios, the trained fighter pilot who uses his mind to suppress emotions in order to become a pilot but then fails to pay attention to his reality and crashes his plane, and, the novice boatman left to drift at sea without compass, radar, food, or water, yet who finds the will to survive even though he has no training and no tools. Through his lucid prose, Gonzales reveals the human brain that functions at three levels -- analytical, emotional, and visceral. It is when these three levels over function, underfunction, or fail to talk to one another that danger turns into disaster. After all, why does the trained fighter pilot blow it and crash his plane into the ship when his instrument panel, the ship's flight tower, and the flight commander all tell him to abort his landing? Why does the clueless novice figure out how to survive 72 days on the open sea?

For Gonzales, there are two sets of dynamics. First, how are we defining reality? Fighter pilots actually become successful because they can use the analytical part of their brains to follow discrete instructions even though the visceral brain stem is telling them to not fly. Connecting the analytical and visceral regions, the emotional portions of the brain through the successful flying experience bookmarks for the brain, "This sequence of activities leads to happy results and this one doesn't." However, if the pilot comes to see survival just as remembering that one sequence and the scenario changes, the pilot then cannot suspend belief in past experience and thus the organizing part of the brain blocks out the information that contradicts this perspective. Through that disconnect, the brain freezes and the pilot crashes his plane.

Second, if reality is changing, can we change with it? Gonzales tells of survivors, such as the lone sailor, who realizes right from the get go that he is in serious trouble and rather than fit his reality into a preconceived map (which is why it takes experienced hikers longer to realize their lost), he immediately begins to seek out clues for survival.

Gonzales also points out something that I have not seen any adventure or survivor writer observe: The lost find a beauty in their dire situations. I have read most of the mountaineering and sailing accounts that Gonzales retells. Also, I have been lost; faced death, and have rescued others, yet no one but Gonzales has remarked on this odd fact. Retelling the story of Joe Simpson's Touching the Void, the most gripping story of survival I have ever read, he brings to light a certain strength that is present in survivors but overlooked. Gonzales quotes Simpson who is laying atop a pile of ice, knee broken inside an ice crevass, "A pillar of gold light beamed diagonally from a small hole in the roof, spraying the bright reflecions offthe far wall of the crevass. I was mesmerized by the beam of sunliht burning through the vaulted ceiling from the real world outside. It had me so fixated that I fort about the uncertain floor below and let myself slide down the rest of the slope. I was going to reach that sunbeam....I just knew."

I must admit, the beginning of Deep Survivor struck me as another macho, jock, how-I-made-it-in-the-wilderness survival read. However, this was was more due to Gonzales own awkwardness with his feelings that the traumas he had survived were insignificant compared to the exploits of his father. Gonzales finally resolves that fear of insignificance and with poignancy and humor points out his own capacity for error. He closes his book with a very poignant meditation of gratitude for his father, a man who faced so many threats to his own life -- and kept on living physically and emotionally -- and conversely endowed his son with a phenomenal will to live.

The excellent balance between personal emotion and detached analysis makes Deep Survival a wonderful read. I have recommended it to doctors, psychologists, mountaineers, and people of the spirit. They all have come back with resounding praise for the book and found that it spoke to them beyond the confines of science and deeper than the thrills of adventure. Perhaps it is not danger that motivates the human heart, but rather it may be beauty and life without beauty, is not a life well lived.

If you are doing a dissertation on the psychology of survival, this is the book for you. Unfortunately, I enjoy how people survive, and would rather get at the story itself, not whether the person has the brain synapses that promote survival. This book has very lengthy, adjective filled paragraphs (ex:"If you could see adreneline, then you'd see a great, green, greasy river of it oozing off the beach..."), lots of references to where he got his information, that could have been better footnoted, and long explanations of a particular psychological reason for a persons survival or demise. Again, dissertation-read this. Entertainment-pass.

It's too bad people picked up this book looking for a memoir. This isn't a memoir, or a even a story. It's a book on psychology, using stories, and how people have told their stories in order to pull from the rubble some sense of what happens in a survivor's brain that doesn't happen with a non-survivor. And in this it does a good job. The stories help to explain the points the author is trying to make, and elaborate how his theories tie in to real life situations. Don't pick up this book if all you want is an adventure story. But if you want some very real information on how best to deal with a crisis situation, this may one of the books near the top of your list.

I wanted to like this book. I love adventure/survival books. The author, instead of telling a captivating story, mixed a bunch of physiological B.S into the mix which took away from the stories he was trying to tell. Want to read a compelling survival book? Go with "Into This Air" or "The history of the Whaleship Essex" or Endurance- Shackletons Journey.

Read this book--it could save your life someday! As a long time outdoor enthusiast, who has been involved in more than my share of risky endeavors, I thoroughly enjoyed Deep Survival. It is definitely not an outdoor survival handbook, but it is a collection of fascinating survival stories, along with the author's commentaries, about what makes the difference in a survival struggle and what it takes to pull through a situation that most would others would not survive. Why, for instance, do 4-6 year olds fare better statistically than 8-12 year olds, when lost in the wilderness? And how did an untrained, poorly equipped 17 year old girl make it out of the jungle alive when twelve adults, who survived the same plane crash, did not? The book ends with a summary of tips for decision making, when it counts, that may well pull you out of a jam some day.

As a long time participant in a variety of outdoor activities I bought this book for the stories of survival and expected to learn more information, tricks and tips about surviving unexpected events and crises. I got that, but a lot more! Gonzales does a great job of unpacking the personality characteristics, attitudes, psychology, etc that lead us to keep going even when everything is against us. His writing style is engaging and very readable as he speaks from his own lifetime of experience in high risk activities while analyzing key elements of some of the well-known and not-so-well-known stories of survivors and non-survivors. A real page-turner that can make you take a new look at yourself, too. I recommend it highly!

This book was a major disappointment. The author seems to be trying so hard to write with a snarky, mega-cool style that he forgets what he's writing about and just jags off to the rhythm of his words. This gets very tedious after a while. If you really want to read about survival, get any book by Jon Krakauer.

This book just became another recommendation (along with The Gift of Fear) to people outside the life who try and understand this kind of world and what it's like.

I've spent the last almost two decades in law enforcement and trying to explain to people why human beings do the insane things they often do can be incredibly difficult. I think the books major contribution is the realization that the overwhelming majority of the decisions we make are not rationally based, particularly under extreme stress.

You cannot address the problem until you understand the problem. And unless you know the why of why people react the way they do you can't change it.

This is one of those rare cases when the average rating on Amazon truly let me down. I found the book choppy and had trouble understanding where the author was going at many points. The stories are truly remarkable, but much of the analysis misses the point - the point being "Who lives, who dies, and why."

Who lives?

Who dies?

Who cares?

This book, a collection of "survival" and "non-survival" stories, reads as a collage of related articles written for a variety of action or science magazines. After the first two or three chapters, you get the point.

Here's the punch line (and I'm not giving away anything that isn't implicit in the title):

1. Sometimes people are put or thrust in situations where their very survival is at stake.

2. Some people make it, and others don't.

3. Author Laurence Gonzales has some suggestions that may improve your survival chances, and he discusses some physiological and psychological issues that may or may not be in your control.


Gonzales mixes up the action with accidents happening to people not looking for adventures, and (mostly) those how are looking for adventure... just not this much.

I listened to an Air Force officer once give a presentation on wilderness survival. First he gave the audience a stern gaze and declared, "If you are lost in the wilderness, you did something wrong. There are no accidents, only mistakes." Then he proceeded to go through multiple case histories and pointed out the mistakes made that led to tragic consequences. Gonzales goes a similar route, but never discourages the reader from avoiding high-risk behaviors. This is a kind of "don't worry, be happy, hope you live" kind of discussion.

This is not a survival book (and it wasn't intended to be). It really a collection of tales of survival and death. The final chapter covers his suggestions that enhance survival, but they are fairly generic.

Here's my biggest issue, however. The book is marketed as an investigation into, among other things, why we engage in risky behaviors. There are so, so, so many other risky behaviors at work and at play that result in huge numbers of deaths. Why weren't these investigated as part of the study of "Who Lives, Who Dies, and Why?" Are there no concerns for the answers to these questions in, say, factories, farms, and football fields?

Look to this book as a collection of adventure tales, and not as a volume that will keep the reader out of trouble. At least you'll know what "dog" is when somebody orders it!

Who lives?

Who dies?

Who cares?

This book, a collection of "survival" and "non-survival" stories, reads as a collage of related articles written for a variety of action or science magazines. After the first two or three chapters, you get the point.

Here's the punch line (and I'm not giving away anything that isn't implicit in the title):

1. Sometimes people are put or thrust in situations where their very survival is at stake.

2. Some people make it, and others don't.

3. Author Laurence Gonzales has some suggestions that may improve your survival chances, and he discusses some physiological and psychological issues that may or may not be in your control.


Gonzales mixes up the action with accidents happening to people not looking for adventures, and (mostly) those how are looking for adventure... just not this much.

I listened to an Air Force officer once give a presentation on wilderness survival. First he gave the audience a stern gaze and declared, "If you are lost in the wilderness, you did something wrong. There are no accidents, only mistakes." Then he proceeded to go through multiple case histories and pointed out the mistakes made that led to tragic consequences. Gonzales goes a similar route, but never discourages the reader from avoiding high-risk behaviors. This is a kind of "don't worry, be happy, hope you live" kind of discussion.

This is not a survival book (and it wasn't intended to be). It really a collection of tales of survival and death. The final chapter covers his suggestions that enhance survival, but they are fairly generic.

Here's my biggest issue, however. The book is marketed as an investigation into, among other things, why we engage in risky behaviors. There are so, so, so many other risky behaviors at work and at play that result in huge numbers of deaths. Why weren't these investigated as part of the study of "Who Lives, Who Dies, and Why?" Are there no concerns for the answers to these questions in, say, factories, farms, and football fields?

Look to this book as a collection of adventure tales, and not as a volume that will keep the reader out of trouble.

As stated in the text, the sun melted into the deep desert mountains, or some such nonsense. There are nice nuggets of wisdom here but you really have to want to find them. I would have stopped reading but I chose this one for the reading group so I was committed.

This is not a premasticated self help guide. There are exciting tales of wilderness adventure and military exploit; however, I found, as a new widow, each "lesson" spoke directly to me and gave me something to which I could relate. Mr. Gonzales has penned an exciting guide to the psychological aspects of human survival. Well balanced, without exageration of thrills or reduction of science to brain twinkies. Not a substitute for proper skill training but very, very necessary for the business of living. I am giving a copy to each of my grown, thrill seeking sons and brothers.