Took the day off from hiking and caught up on some reading, emailing, and laundry. I’m writing this post 7 days after the fact, and have since finished two books I was working on:
- Deep Survival, by Laurence Gonzales. This book was written by the son of a fighter pilot who was shot down in WWII and survived a 20,000 foot free-fall. Gonzales is a journalist who has written extensively on many disasters and the remarkable people who survive them against all odds. The book is filled with the stories of mountaineers, sailors, pilots, passengers in airplane crashes, and 9-11 WTC Tower escapees.
While throwing around terms from Chaos theory, neurobiology, and psychology, the author attempts to draw some conclusions about what separates the survivors from those who just sit down and succumb to hypothermia and are lost forever. It’s not an earth-shattering book, nor should it ever be called a scientific treatment, but asks a very important question and I happen to agree with his overall philosophy, so I looked the other way at the major faults in this overhyped book.
Mainly, the idea is that survival is about more than what’s in your pack. A lot of it has to do with sheer luck, a strong will to live, and the ability to Be Here Now. If you can be in the moment while lost in the woods, instead of racing around in a blind panic and despairing your horrible fate, you may notice things (sources of nourishment and water, or signs of danger which you can avoid) that can keep you alive another day. This book is worth a read, especially for the outdoors-person.
- Ender’s Game, by Orson Scott Card. I got this book at the campsite which has a take-one-leave-one library. Not one I would have picked out if I’d had infinite choices, but it turned out to be a lovely book. I haven’t read much YA fiction (even when I was a YA myself) so I’m still not quite sure how to get in the right frame of mind to read them. I think it takes a much more active imagination than I’ve got (at least for the world of spaceships and interstellar warfare, which isn’t my usual reading material). Even so, the book is unquestionably good, and even brought a tear to my eye a few times. Recommended for the young at heart, or the science-fiction geeks.