PDF Ebook Deep Survival: Who Lives, Who Dies, and Why, by Laurence Gonzales
There is no doubt that publication Deep Survival: Who Lives, Who Dies, And Why, By Laurence Gonzales will consistently provide you motivations. Also this is simply a publication Deep Survival: Who Lives, Who Dies, And Why, By Laurence Gonzales; you could locate lots of styles and also types of publications. From amusing to experience to politic, and also sciences are all given. As exactly what we mention, here we provide those all, from famous authors and also publisher in the world. This Deep Survival: Who Lives, Who Dies, And Why, By Laurence Gonzales is among the collections. Are you interested? Take it currently. How is the way? Learn more this write-up!
Deep Survival: Who Lives, Who Dies, and Why, by Laurence Gonzales
PDF Ebook Deep Survival: Who Lives, Who Dies, and Why, by Laurence Gonzales
Exactly how if your day is begun by reading a book Deep Survival: Who Lives, Who Dies, And Why, By Laurence Gonzales But, it is in your gizmo? Everybody will certainly consistently touch and us their gadget when awakening and in early morning activities. This is why, we intend you to also check out a book Deep Survival: Who Lives, Who Dies, And Why, By Laurence Gonzales If you still puzzled how you can obtain guide for your gizmo, you could follow the way right here. As here, we offer Deep Survival: Who Lives, Who Dies, And Why, By Laurence Gonzales in this web site.
Reading Deep Survival: Who Lives, Who Dies, And Why, By Laurence Gonzales is an extremely useful interest and doing that can be undertaken whenever. It implies that reading a publication will not limit your activity, will certainly not require the moment to spend over, and won't spend much money. It is a quite cost effective as well as obtainable thing to acquire Deep Survival: Who Lives, Who Dies, And Why, By Laurence Gonzales But, with that very inexpensive point, you could get something brand-new, Deep Survival: Who Lives, Who Dies, And Why, By Laurence Gonzales something that you never ever do and get in your life.
A brand-new encounter could be acquired by reviewing a publication Deep Survival: Who Lives, Who Dies, And Why, By Laurence Gonzales Also that is this Deep Survival: Who Lives, Who Dies, And Why, By Laurence Gonzales or various other book compilations. We offer this publication since you can locate much more things to urge your skill and expertise that will make you better in your life. It will be additionally beneficial for the people around you. We recommend this soft file of guide right here. To know how to get this book Deep Survival: Who Lives, Who Dies, And Why, By Laurence Gonzales, learn more right here.
You can find the web link that our company offer in website to download Deep Survival: Who Lives, Who Dies, And Why, By Laurence Gonzales By purchasing the budget-friendly rate and obtain completed downloading, you have actually completed to the first stage to get this Deep Survival: Who Lives, Who Dies, And Why, By Laurence Gonzales It will be nothing when having acquired this publication and do nothing. Review it and disclose it! Invest your couple of time to simply review some sheets of web page of this book Deep Survival: Who Lives, Who Dies, And Why, By Laurence Gonzales to review. It is soft file and easy to review any place you are. Enjoy your new practice.
"Unique among survival books... stunning... enthralling. Deep Survival makes compelling, and chilling, reading."―Penelope Purdy, Denver Post
In ?Deep Survival?, Laurence Gonzalez combines hard science and powerful storytelling to illustrate the mysteries of survival, whether in the wilderness or in meeting any of life's great challenges. This gripping narrative, the first book to describe the art and science of survival, will change the way you see the world. Everyone has a mountain to climb. Everyone has a wilderness inside.
- Sales Rank: #15442 in Books
- Brand: W.W. Norton & Co
- Published on: 2004-10-17
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 8.30" h x .90" w x 5.50" l, .57 pounds
- Binding: Paperback
- 318 pages
Features
From Publishers Weekly
When confronted with a life-threatening situation, 90% of people freeze or panic, says Gonzales in this exploration of what makes the remaining 10% stay cool, focused and alive. Gonzales (The Hero's Apprentice; The Still Point), who has covered survival stories for National Geographic Explorer, Outside and Men's Journal, uncovers the biological and psychological reasons people risk their lives and why some are better at it than others. In the first part of the book, the author talks to dozens of thrill-seekers-mountain climbers, sailors, jet pilots-and they all say the same thing: danger is a great rush. "Fear can be fun," Gonzales writes. "It can make you feel more alive, because it is an integral part of saving your own life." Pinpointing why and how those 10% survive is another story. "They are the ones who can perceive their situation clearly; they can plan and take correct action," Gonzales explains. Survivors, whether they're jet pilots landing on the deck of an aircraft carrier or boatbuilders adrift on a raft in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, share certain traits: training, experience, stoicism and a capacity for their logical neocortex (the brain's thinking part) to override the primitive amygdala portion of their brains. Although there's no surefire way to become a survivor, Gonzales does share some rules for adventure gleaned from the survivors themselves: stay calm, be decisive and don't give up. Remembering these rules when crisis strikes may be tough, but Gonzales's vivid descriptions of life in the balance will stay with readers.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Booklist
What impels people to risk their lives by climbing mountains or deep-sea diving? What confluence of forces leads to drastic accidents? Why do some people survive disasters while others perish? A renowned journalist intrigued with risk, Gonzales conducts an in-depth and engrossing inquiry into the dynamics of survival. Relating one hair-raising true story after another about wilderness adventures gone catastrophically wrong and other calamities, Gonzales draws on sources as diverse and compelling as the Stoic philosophers and neuroscience to elucidate the psychological, physiological, and spiritual strengths that enable certain individuals to avoid fatal panic and make that crucial "transition from victim to survivor." People who survive being lost or adrift at sea, for instance, pay close attention to their surroundings and respect the wild. Gonzales also notes that survivors think of others, either helping a fellow sufferer or rallying to outsmart death in order to spare loved ones anguish. The study of survival offers an illuminating portal into the human psyche, and Gonzales, knowledgeable and passionate, is a compelling and trustworthy guide. Donna Seaman
Copyright � American Library Association. All rights reserved
Review
“A fascinating look into why we are who we are.” (Bill McKibben, author of The End of Nature and Enough)
“Deep Survival is by far the best book on the many insights into epic survival stories I have ever read.” (Daryl Miller, Chief of Mountaineering, Denali National Park & Preserve)
“A feast of excitement and wonder. Makes complexity and chaos come alive, girdled by neurological processes, drenched with fantastic accounts of danger and death. You will see the world differently.” (Charles Perrow, author of Normal Accidents)
“Great stories of disaster and survival... combined with revealing science about the physiology and psychology of how we deal with crisis.... Accurate, accessible, up-to-date and insightful.” (Robert Sapolsky, author of Why Zebras Don't Get Ulcers)
“Laurence Gonzales has masterfully woven together personal survival stories with the study of human perception to reach rock-bottom truths about how to live with risk.” (Peter Stark, author of Last Breath: The Limits of Adventure)
“Professional rescuers will love this book. It goes to the heart of the instincts that drive us to risk our own lives to save others.” (Jacki Golike, Executive Director, National Association for Search and Rescue)
“Gonzalez takes us on a fascinating, fast-paced, and exciting adventure into survival. His captivating stories, many from personal experience, will keep you turning the pages, stopping only to imagine how you, and your brain, would react when faced with a survival experience.” (Joseph LeDoux, author of The Emotional Brain and Synaptic Self)
Most helpful customer reviews
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful.
Others will run about like headless chickens
By Curt Seefeldt
What a book!!! Personally, I think everyone ought to read it. Why? Well, for one thing in today's world, as well as in past history, "things happen". Is everyone prepared to deal with that? Not on your life. Some people will just simply freeze up. Others will run about like headless chickens. This book goes into explaining what happens when a crisis hits and why people act the way they do. The thing is, with the knowledge given in this book one can well.....sort of "program" their mind to at least try to respond properly. Also, one of the great things about this book is the way it explains what is going on. Easy to understand, so you don't need to be an astrophysist. This book is not about laying in food supplies or building bomb shelters. It IS a book that will help you keep your head when things go really bad.
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful.
Valuable, Stoic-Centric Advice For Accident Survival, and Life Survival
By Charles
I read Laurence Gonzales’ “Deep Survival: Who Lives, Who Dies, And Why” as a counterpoint to Amanda Ripley’s “The Unthinkable.” Both are survivor books, very different in their approach, but with significant conclusions in common. Gonzales focuses more on accidents: unexpected twists that challenge people in stressful situations they chose to put themselves in, primarily wilderness and sporting recreational activities. Gonzales focuses little on true disasters, where our daily lives are suddenly interrupted by a wholly unexpected catastrophic and immediately life threatening event from which we must escape; Ripley focuses on true disasters. Gonzales focuses a lot on scientific, technical biological explanations; Ripley talks a lot about pseudo-scientific evolutionary biology. Gonzales is a more florid writer on a semi-autobiographical quest following a life of adventure; Ripley is a straightforward young writer trying to analyze what others do.
But this review is about Gonzales’ book, which aspires to “tell people [not] what to do but rather to be a search for a deeper understanding that will allow them to know what to do when the time comes.” His book tries to provide an overarching philosophy, really, for life survival, not just survival when you’re lost in the woods or hanging off a mountain. In fact, if there is a unifying theme of “Deep Survival,” other than survival itself, it is Stoicism. Quotations from Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius litter the book, and their ideas permeate every page. For example, from Epictetus: “On the occasion of every accident that befalls you, remember to turn to yourself and inquire what power you have for turning it to use.” This is because Gonzales believes, with demonstrated reason, that a Stoic approach to unexpected twists in life will maximize your chances for survival, in whatever situation you find yourself.
Gonzales ties all his stories and thoughts back to himself—back to his own growing appreciation for these principles he discovers during his life, and most of all back to his father’s experiences in World War Two and the rest of his life (he was a bomber pilot alive at the time this book was written, 2004). If you don’t like the personal angle, it may seem a bit navel-gazing. But he does a good job making himself and his family relevant, and after all, it’s his book, not merely a textbook for the wanna-be survivor.
Gonzales spends the first half of the book evaluating “How Accidents Happen.” In other words, most of what he focuses on is preventable survival problems. For him, if you stay home, there will be no survival problem. And, for the most part, if you go out into the wilderness and make the right choices, there will also be no survival problem. What Gonzales wants to know in this section is why people act in ways that create situations in which they must survive. His conclusion, shot through the book, is that it’s down to uncontrollable emotions, mostly for bad, but also for good. Quoting Remarque’s description in “All Quiet On The Western Front” of men who, having been at the front for a while, thrown themselves to the ground on sheer reflex, even before they can hear or sense a shell, Gonzales concludes “Emotion is an instinctive response aimed at self-preservation.” But that same instinctive response can also betray.
There is much talk of dopamine, brain structures, stress hormones, memory, and, in the end, “that quality which is perhaps the only one which may be said with certainty to make for success, self-control.” Our brains conspire to impel us by inciting emotions to do things that are not rational and not a good idea, but seem like a good idea to our brains. We need this type of decision making, since it is fast and effective, but it can kill us, if the emotion leads us to do something objectively stupid. Panic is only one of those emotions; pleasurable emotions are also extremely powerful. Controlling those emotions without losing their benefit is everything. And not just the control of manipulation—also the control of knowing what you don’t know. “A survivor expects the world to keep changing and keeps his senses always tuned to: What’s up? The survivor is continuously adapting.” “[T]he survivor ‘does not impose pre-existing patterns on new information, but rather allows new information to reshape [his mental models].’”
Of course, even choosing activities carefully while engaging in rigid self-control is often not enough. Accident always happen; it is the nature of systems, even simple systems. Small failures are self-correcting or at least not catastrophic, until the day they combine with other happenings to create total failure. As with a sand pile, which slides and collapses in unpredictable ways, you can tell that an accident will happen despite your best efforts, but not how or when. (It helps, of course, not to be stupid or have undesirable characteristics. Gonzales, like Ripley, casually slags fat people as unlikely to survive.) This is a commonality of systems: Gonzales notes that Clausewitz pointed out that military systems seemed simple, and therefore easy to manage, but “terrible friction . . . is everywhere in contact with chance, with consequences that are impossible to calculate.” Again, Clausewitz says a general must not “expect a level of precision in his operation that simply cannot be achieved owing to this very friction.” And trying to impose our own reality on actual reality when that friction starts to bite is disastrous.
Even if you choose carefully and have self-control, and avoid a system failure, you may still end up in a survival situation by simple failure of knowledge. If you don’t bother to inquire how the local waves differ from the waves you are familiar with, you may end up in trouble that you could have easily avoided. Gonzales does not promise that everything will be OK; he merely offers analysis and advice for maximizing the chance of avoiding problems.
Gonzales then turns to “Survival”—what to do when, for whatever reason, you’ve ended up in a survival situation. Many people “bend the map”—they try to, when lost in an unfamiliar area, rationalize how they are really in a familiar area. Don’t do that. Be as Stoic as possible. Accept your fate yet work to change it. Never follow rules given by others just because they are rules or because they are the group. Never give up. Fatigue is mostly psychological and difficult to recover from; rest proactively rather than pushing yourself. Balance risk and reward, then act decisively—be a “man of action.” Pray—even if it doesn’t work, it helps you focus and take action. (Although neither Gonzales nor Ripley emphasize it, both note that religious people are far more likely to survive.) “Plan the flight and fly the plan. But don’t fall in love with the plan.” Give yourself small goals and achieve small successes; follow a routine; create order. Focus on yourself, not on blaming others, or relying on them. And, ultimately, you may still die. “But what can be earned is a certain nobility—not in the sense of aristocratic status but in the sense of striving for quality and dignity of behavior and living.” The last is said by a wilderness firefighter of his daily job, but it can just as well be applied to a survivor in a single desperate situation.
None of what Gonzales says is all that startling. I imagine many of us would list some variations on these if asked the question, “what should one do to survive?” But Gonzales weaves these principles into a coherent whole, and links them to a range of interesting stories about real people. As with Ripley’s book, whose more cut-and-dried lessons Gonzales echoes, the reader can benefit quite a bit from this book, if you read carefully and absorb the lessons.
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful.
I Survived Reading It
By NHBunion
I should have read the one and two star reviews here on Amazon b4 buying this book. I agree that it starts off great, but after a while.......zzzzzzzzzzzzzz. Laurence Gonzales's writing style jumps around so much, I found myself re-reading many sentences to figure out what he was trying to say. Where was the editor on this one?
I expected the book to be "who lives, who dies, and why", & reading how people survived plane crashes, boating mishaps, etc. WAS riveting, but about half way through the book it became a struggle for ME to survive. The author's focus veers off to obsessing about his father's life, (perhaps another book?)...but I found it overwhelmed the initial subject.
See all 519 customer reviews...
Deep Survival: Who Lives, Who Dies, and Why, by Laurence Gonzales PDF
Deep Survival: Who Lives, Who Dies, and Why, by Laurence Gonzales EPub
Deep Survival: Who Lives, Who Dies, and Why, by Laurence Gonzales Doc
Deep Survival: Who Lives, Who Dies, and Why, by Laurence Gonzales iBooks
Deep Survival: Who Lives, Who Dies, and Why, by Laurence Gonzales rtf
Deep Survival: Who Lives, Who Dies, and Why, by Laurence Gonzales Mobipocket
Deep Survival: Who Lives, Who Dies, and Why, by Laurence Gonzales Kindle
Deep Survival: Who Lives, Who Dies, and Why, by Laurence Gonzales PDF
Deep Survival: Who Lives, Who Dies, and Why, by Laurence Gonzales PDF
Deep Survival: Who Lives, Who Dies, and Why, by Laurence Gonzales PDF
Deep Survival: Who Lives, Who Dies, and Why, by Laurence Gonzales PDF
