Product Description
"Unique among survival books...stunning...enthralling. Deep Survival makes compelling, and chilling, reading."—Penelope Purdy, Denver Post

After her plane crashes, a seventeen-year-old girl spends eleven days walking through the Peruvian jungle. Against all odds, with no food, shelter, or equipment, she gets out. A better-equipped group of adult survivors of the same crash sits down and dies. What makes the difference?

Examining such stories of miraculous endurance and tragic death—how people get into trouble and how they get out again (or not)—Deep Survival takes us from the tops of snowy mountains and the depths of oceans to the workings of the brain that control our behavior. Through close analysis of case studies, Laurence Gonzales describes the "stages of survival" and reveals the essence of a survivor—truths that apply not only to surviving in the wild but also to surviving life-threatening illness, relationships, the death of a loved one, running a business during uncertain times, even war.

Fascinating for any reader, and absolutely essential for anyone who takes a hike in the woods, this book will change the way we understand ourselves and the great outdoors.

CUSTOMER REVIEWS (Average Customer Rating: 4.0 based on 143 reviews)

A Great Book

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.
September 26, 2008

Could get though the first chapter.

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.
September 23, 2008

Excellent!

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.
September 16, 2008

Lessons for Management

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

August 23, 2008

Deep Survival

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".
August 19, 2008

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