The weekend is coming so I’d like to leave you with some outstanding book recs.
You know me, I’m a nonfic addict. Found a couple of good ones. No, a couple of great ones, if you’re strong enough to handle them.
The first book recently celebrated it’s big official release~
Flight 232: A Story of Disaster and Survival, by Laurence Gonzales
Twenty-five years after the catastrophe, a dramatic and extraordinarily rare 360-degree view of the crash of a fully loaded jumbo jet.
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.
The author, Laurence Gonzales, was kind enough to provide me with a preview of the book and ultimately, I hope, an interview. If you recall, Mr. Gonzales saved our lives when we were stranded in The Boundary Waters. (The canoe trip from hell.) We survived because my husband and I had read one of his previous books, Deep Survival, Who Lives, Who Dies, and Why. I contacted Mr. Gonzales after that trip and he got back to me the same day. I know it’s a coincidence, but he’d been fishing up in The Boundary Waters just the week before. Of course he went with a real guide as opposed to my husband and I who went with an unreal guide. (Ours was only a guide in his own mind.)
His book, Deep Survival, helped us make decisions that kept us safe and, more important, alive.
Laurence Gonzales new book, Flight 232: A Story of Disaster and Survival is everything the title says. It’s a thoroughly researched, detailed, gripping, harrowing account of disaster, determination, courage, luck, and yes, survival. I remember the crash very well. I lived eighty-some miles to the south of the Sioux City airport. As an ICCU nurse, I was called back to the hospital in case any survivors were sent our way. You can only imagine the sense of dread we shared, the horror at knowing what was coming. Fortunately our services were not required.
I have to admit I can be a nervous flier. Sometimes I’m great in the air, sometimes not so great.
***Warning: If you suffer from a fear of flying read this book with caution.
I suffered some PTSD after reading the book, even during. The author admitted to me he suffered PTSD writing the book. But truly the story is so daunting, so heroic and so miraculous it’s hard to put the book down.
Laurence Gonzales does it yet again. I give him 5+ stars on my 0-5 star-o-meter. Flight 232: A Story of Disaster and Survival is brilliant.
Ya’ll ready for this?
The Big Fat Surprise: Why Butter, Meat and Cheese Belong in a Healthy Diet, by Nina Teicholz
In The Big Fat Surprise, investigative journalist Nina Teicholz reveals the unthinkable: that everything we thought we knew about dietary fat is wrong. She documents how the low-fat nutrition advice of the past sixty years has amounted to a vast uncontrolled experiment on the entire population, with disastrous consequences for our health.
For decades, we have been told that the best possible diet involves cutting back on fat, especially saturated fat, and that if we are not getting healthier or thinner it must be because we are not trying hard enough. But what if the low-fat diet is itself the problem? What if the very foods we’ve been denying ourselves—the creamy cheeses, the sizzling steaks—are themselves the key to reversing the epidemics of obesity, diabetes, and heart disease?
In this captivating, vibrant, and convincing narrative, based on a nine-year-long investigation, Teicholz shows how the misinformation about saturated fats took hold in the scientific community and the public imagination, and how recent findings have overturned these beliefs. She explains why the Mediterranean Diet is not the healthiest, and how we might be replacing trans fats with something even worse. This startling history demonstrates how nutrition science has gotten it so wrong: how overzealous researchers, through a combination of ego, bias, and premature institutional consensus, have allowed dangerous misrepresentations to become dietary dogma.
With eye-opening scientific rigor, The Big Fat Surprise upends the conventional wisdom about all fats with the groundbreaking claim that more, not less, dietary fat—including saturated fat—is what leads to better health and wellness. Science shows that we have been needlessly avoiding meat, cheese, whole milk, and eggs for decades and that we can now, guilt-free, welcome these delicious foods back into our lives.
I could say so much about this book I don’t even know what to say about it. I read it straight through - began the book on my Kindle while waiting to board my flight in Sacramento and finished it just before landing back in Sacramento. I kept yelling — “Yes! Yes! Yes!” I must have sounded like Meg Ryan in When Harry Met Sally. The book is like 500 bloody pages but I could not put it down. Talk about research! Whoa! Hey, my daughter is getting her masters in this field and these are the people with whom she wants to do research. I’m telling you-
Read. This. Book.
You won’t regret it. Again, 5+ stars on my 0-5 star-o-meter.
No losers this time around! Total winners! Yippee!!!
