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SURVIVING SURVIVAL

Laurence Gonzales

SURVIVING SURVIVAL is a fascinating consideration of what happens to people, such as those he has profiled in his earlier bestsellers DEEP SURVIVAL and REMEMBERING SURVIVAL, who have escaped life-threatening situations once they resume their "normal" lives.
The survival experience of a plane crash, a mountaineering disaster, a roadside bombing changes everything. It has the effect of invalidating all one's previous adaptations. Many survivors suffer more in the aftermath than they did during the actual crisis. A wife is shot by her husband, who then kills himself. A woman is attacked by a crocodile while on holiday. A sailor, wrecked at sea, watches two shipmates be devoured by sharks. Each lived to tell the tale, as they say, but were wracked with nightmares, panic attacks, crippling depression completely traumatized. Gonzales examines how they eventually made peace with their experiences and how each was changed, change being psychologically and neurologically inevitable in the circumstances. Every survivor must work hard to reinvent him or herself. As Gonzales shows, in many inspiring cases, they find that their lives are far richer for having gone through the ordeal and that there is much the average person can learn about coping with the setbacks we all experience in the course of normal lives. Laurence Gonzales has been studying accidents and their roots in human behaviour for more than 35 years. He has published widely, won numerous awards, and appeared as a speaker before numerous and varied audiences. He is a contributing editor for National Geographic Adventure magazine and has written for Harper's and Conde Nast Traveler, among others. He lives in Evanston, Il.
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Published 2012-10-01 by W.W. Norton & Company, Inc. - New York (USA)

Comments

Survivors of traumatic events often do not recover without help from others, and Gonzales’ excellent book is an education for those wishing to be of use in a stressful, often frightening world. Read more...

Illness. Divorce. Job Loss. The Death of a loved one. You don't get this far in life without experiencing some adversity. But while you can't avoid painful events, you can learn to control your response to them. Here, [Gonzales] revals how recovery can be a transforming experience that not only moves us forward but also enriches our lives in ways we never could have imagined.