Laurence Gonzales's bestselling Deep Survival has helped save lives from the deepest wildernesses, just as it has improved readers' everyday lives. Its mix of adventure narrative, survival science, and practical advice has inspired everyone from business leaders to military officers, educators, and psychiatric professionals on how to take control of stress, learn to assess risk, and make better decisions under pressure.

As hundreds of rescue workers waited on the ground, United Airlines Flight 232 wallowed drunkenly over the bluffs northwest of Sioux City. The plane slammed onto the runway and burst into a vast fireball. The rescuers didn't move at first: nobody could possibly survive that crash. And then people began emerging from the summer corn that lined the runways. Miraculously, 184 of 296 passengers lived.

No one has ever attempted the complete reconstruction of a crash of this magnitude. Drawing on interviews with hundreds of survivors, crew, and airport and rescue personnel, Laurence Gonzales, a commercial pilot himself, captures, minute by minute, the harrowing journey of pilots flying a plane with no controls and flight attendants keeping their calm in the face of certain death. He plumbs the hearts and minds of passengers as they pray, bargain with God, plot their strategies for survival, and sacrifice themselves to save others.

Ultimately he takes us, step by step, through the gripping scientific detective work in super-secret labs to dive into the heart of a flaw smaller than a grain of rice that shows what brought the aircraft down.

An unforgettable drama of the triumph of heroism over tragedy and human ingenuity over technological breakdown, Flight 232 is a masterpiece in the tradition of the greatest aviation stories ever told.

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.

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.

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.

Gonzales (Flight 232), a former National Geographic feature writer, proves himself a chronicler par excellence of nature--including of the human variety--in this excellent essay collection. The psychological nuance and vivid detail throughout will dazzle readers.
--Publishers Weekly starred review, July 2020

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.

The University of Arkansas Press is proud to bring these stories to a new era, stories that, as with all of Gonzales's work, fairly sing with a voice all their own. (Chicago Sun-Times)

Laurence Gonzales began his successful publishing career in 1989 with the publication of The Still Point and later The Hero's Apprentice (1994), both with the University of Arkansas Press. From these collections of essays he went on to write for renowned magazines in addition to publishing several books, including the best selling Deep Survival. His journalism garnered two National Magazine Awards, and his latest nonfiction book, Surviving Survival, was named by Kirkus as one of the best books of 2012.

This new collection of essays shows us the sometimes hair-raising, sometimes heart-wrenching writing that Gonzales has become known for. This compelling and trustworthy guide (Booklist) takes us from a maximum-security prison to a cancer ward, from a mental institution to the World Trade Center. Among the essays included is Marion Prison, a National Magazine Award finalist, with its intimate view inside the most maximum security prison in America. House of Pain takes the reader into the life of a brain surgeon at Chicago's Cook County Hospital, a grim world that few ever see. Rites of Spring, another National Magazine Award finalist, follows Gonzales and his wife on their journey through cancer, not once, but twice.

Other stories venture above the Arctic Circle, flying deep into the Alaskan wilderness among grizzly bears and trumpeter swans; explore aerobatics in high-performance aircraft; and eulogize Memphis and Miami as American cities that mourn their fates in uniquely different ways.

Galt Airport in northern Illinois is known to the people who fly out of it as One-Zero-Charlie (for its FAA designation as Airport 10C). This evocative excursion into a little-known part of the heart of America takes us to a place where a love of flying draws people together, and a fascination with its sheer exhilaration keeps them that way.