Book review: Deep Survival by Laurence Gonzales

How is it that a mountaineer with years of experience and the most advanced equipment can lose his life on a “routine” climb, while an unprepared teenage girl can survive a plane crash and days of barefoot trekking through the Peruvian jungle?  What would make a trained Army Ranger who is thrown from a commercial raft push away rescuers and float downstream to drown?  Why do people who are lost keep going deeper into the wilderness instead of retracing their steps back to more familiar surroundings? 

These are the sorts of questions underpinning Laurence Gonzales’s Deep Survival: Who Lives, Who Dies, and Why (W.W. Norton, 2003).  A contributing editor for National Geographic Adventure, Gonzales goes beyond merely recounting compelling survival stories to an in-depth exploration of the science of survival.  He illuminates how the brain reacts to different types of danger and examines the physiological and psychological characteristics of survivors. 

This fascinating book concludes with a chapter entitled “The Rules of Adventure,” in which Gonzales offers “a few suggestions, first for staying out of trouble, then for dealing with it when it comes.”  Deep Survival is a book not just for adventure travelers, but also, as Gonzales puts it, “for the rest of us, who just want to get through life’s rough spots and go out now and then to see the beauty or to get a little adrenaline fix.”