The shark attacked while she was snorkeling, tearing through Micki Glenn s breast and shredding her right arm. Her husband, a surgeon, saved her life on the spot, but when she was safely home she couldn t just go on with her life. She had entered an even more profound survival journey: the aftermath. The survival experience changes everything because it invalidates all your previous adaptations, and the old rules don t apply. In some cases survivors suffer more in the aftermath than they did during the actual crisis. In all cases, they have to work hard to reinvent themselves. Drawing on gripping cases across a wide range of life-threatening experiences, Laurence Gonzales fashions a compelling argument about fear, courage, and the adaptability of the human spirit. Micki Glenn was later moved to say: I don t regret that this happened to me. It] has been . . . probably the single most positive experience I ve ever had. "

On 19 July 1989, while United Airlines flight 232 wallowed drunkenly northwest of the airport at Sioux City, Iowa, hundreds of fire and rescue workers waited. The plane slammed onto the runway, broke into pieces and burst into a fireball. The rescue workers did not move: nobody could survive that crash. And then people began walking out of the field lining the runway. Miraculously, 184 of 296 passengers lived-138, unhurt. Laurence Gonzales, interviewed dozens of the survivors of Flight 232. He takes the reader through the detective work that found the fatal flaw in an exploded titanium fan disk. More powerful still is the heroism he found: pilots flying a plane with no controls; flight attendants keeping their calm in the face of certain death; passengers sacrificing themselves to save others.

With its mix of adventure narrative, survival science and practical advice, Deep Survival inspires readers on how to take control of stress, learn to assess risk and make better decisions under pressure.

Primatologist Jenny Lowe is studying bonobo chimpanzees deep in the Congo when she is caught in a deadly civil war that leaves a fellow researcher dead and his daughter, Lucy, orphaned. Realizing that the child has no living relatives, Jenny begins to care for Lucy as her own. But as she reads the late scientist's notebooks, she discovers that Lucy is the result of a shocking experiment, and that the adorable, magical, wonderful girl she has come to love is an entirely new hybrid species--half human, half bonobo.

Galt Airport in northern Illinois, known to its pilots as "One Zero Charlie" (for its Federal Aviation Administration designation as Airport 10C), is a microcosm of grass roots aviation. Through his years of flying, Laurence Gonzales flew out of One Zero Charlie and has come to know the flying men and women who have made it a sort of all-hours club, where someone is always brewing coffee, and the doughnuts are fresh from the bakery. By turns exhilarating, intimate, hilarious, and tragic, this book explores the most democratic America there is, the only qualification being that you have to be crazy to join. No detached observer, Gonzales is deeply involved in his Blue Highways of the sky. He skillfully rips through our illusions and gets at the perverse reality of aviation, in which science can turn to witchcraft in a flicker, and those who aren't quick to notice the transformation are quick to perish.

In 1989, Laurence Gonzales was a young writer with his first book of essays, The Still Point, just published by the University of Arkansas Press. Imagine his surprise, one winter day, to receive a letter from none other than Kurt Vonnegut. 'The excellence of your writing and the depth of your reporting saddened me, in a way,' Vonnegut wrote, 'reminding me yet again what a tiny voice facts and reason have in this era of wrap-around, mega-decibel rock-and-roll.' Several books, many articles, and a growing list of awards later, Gonzales -- known for taking us to enthralling extremes - is still writing with excellence and depth. In this latest collection, we go from the top of Mount Washington and 'the worst weather in the world,' to 12,000 feet beneath the ocean, where a Naval Intelligence Officer discovers the Titanic using the government's own spy equipment. We experience night assaults with the 82nd Airborne Division, the dynamiting of the 100-foot snowpack on Going-to-the-Sun Road in Glacier National Park, a trip to the International Space Station, the crash of an airliner to the bottom of the Everglades, and more.

"Curiosity, awareness, attention," Laurence Gonzales writes. "Those are the tools of our everyday survival. . . . We all must be scientists at heart or be victims of forces that we don't understand." In this fascinating account, Gonzales turns his talent for gripping narrative, knowledge of the way our minds and bodies work, and bottomless curiosity about the world to the topic of how we can best use the blessings of evolution to overcome the hazards of everyday life. Everyday Survival will teach you to make the right choices for our complex, dangerous, and quickly changing world-whether you are climbing a mountain or the corporate ladder.