53 pages • 1 hour read
Laurence GonzalesDeep Survival: Who Lives, Who Dies, and Why
Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 1998A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Key Figures
Laurence Gonzales
Laurence Gonzales is a journalist and author of numerous books such as Flight 232, Lucy, One Zero Charlie, and The Chemistry of Fire. Gonzales was born in 1947 in Missouri to Anna Marie Mosher and Frederico Gonzales, an American military pilot who was shot down over Germany during World War II. Learning about his father’s experiences during the war piqued the author’s interest in aviation and survival. He eventually trained as a pilot himself and flew a variety of planes. The author is also an avid mountaineer, motorcyclist, and outdoorsman. Gonzales also has a background in adventure journalism for publications such as Playboy magazine.
Gonzales’s many adventurous interests and writing background have given him a rich foundation of experience to draw on in his work. He shares stories about his time serving in the military, being lost in the mountains, and having brushes with death while motorcycling and traveling. These experiences also connected him to experts in many fields, such as pilot instructors, wilderness survival crews, firefighters, lifeguards, and more. Gonzales’s personal investment in the topic leads to emotive prose and impassioned warnings that both exult and premonish experiences in nature. This push and pull of fear and excitement seem to exist within the author and all successful survivors, which gives the book a core of pathos.
In addition to drawing on his personal experiences, Gonzales also performed research for this book by attending survival schools and reading about neuroscience. By grounding Deep Survival in scientific data, Gonzales delves deeply into human behavior and legitimizes his work as reliable advice for other adventurers. This blend of scientific and anecdotal evidence has proven to be a winning combination, as Deep Survival is a best seller and earned Gonzales the Montaigne Medal for writing.
Frederico Gonzales
Frederico Gonzales is Laurence Gonzales’s father. An American pilot and scientist, Frederico was a celebrated military veteran who survived his plane being shot down over Germany during World War II. Frederico is a major source of inspiration to his son, the author, and prompted Gonzales’s interest in aviation and survival. The author lauds his father’s ability to perform under extreme duress, and the courage and good humor he displayed in the aftermath of the war. Gonzales reveals near the end that he always wanted to emulate his father’s cool demeanor and skill as an aviator.
Frederico’s story bookends Deep Survival, and the author emphasizes not only his father’s physical survival but his psychological resilience as well. By ending on his father’s story, the author highlights that successful survival is not about a single instance but a lifetime of choices and maintaining a positive mindset. The author argues that Frederico demonstrated a survivalist spirit by embracing life after the war. He pursued a career, raised a large family, and enjoyed myriad creative pursuits with good humor.
Frederico’s is the only survival story that continues into the present day, turning him into the ultimate survivor, the one who kept living afterward. This continuity allows Frederico to become an inspiration to all the prospective adventurers who read this book, as he was for a young Gonzales.
Steve Callahan
Steve Callahan is an American sailor, boat builder, and inventor. He is the author of Adrift: Seventy Six Days Lost at Sea, which shares his story of being stranded on a lifeboat in the Atlantic Ocean. In Deep Survival, he functions as the archetypal survivor, which all other survivors should model themselves after.
Gonzales calls Callahan a “perfect textbook survivor” (198) and uses his story as an example of the positive side of each of his themes. For Memories, Mental Models, and Bias, Gonzales shows how Callahan not only prepared ahead of time with his survival bag and lifeboat, but adjusted his mental model quickly when a bizarre accident destroyed his boat. When Callahan became stranded, he was Balancing Emotion and Reason to Achieve Focus by allowing his emotions to motivate him and his reason to direct him. While his desire to go home kept him fighting to survive, the logical part of his brain managed his supplies so successfully as to have five pints of water remaining when he was rescued. He also displayed Humility and Humor by giving the things in his environment silly names and continuing to enjoy and respect the beauty of the sea, even as he remained in mortal danger.
An archetypal survivor like Callahan allows Gonzales to show readers exactly what a successful survival situation might look like and ask them to imagine how they might begin to embody Callahan’s survivalist traits.
Joe Simpson
Joe Simpson is a British mountaineer famous for surviving his descent down the Siula Grande, a 6,344 meter mountain in Peru, with a broken leg. Using Simpson’s memoir Touching the Void, Gonzales relates Simpson’s shocking, days-long ordeal journeying down the mountain alone after his climbing partner presumed him dead.
If Callahan is the archetypal survivor, and Frederico Gonzales is the ideal survivor, then Simpson is the adamant survivor. All these men were put in awful situations, but none faced quite as repeated or debilitating disappointments as Joe Simpson. Gonzales uses Simpson’s story to highlight the mental fortitude necessary to survive. He emphasizes that Simpson did not lose time grieving his injury or panicking, but instead focused on keeping a calm mind. He stayed in the present moment by focusing on the patterns of his body as he climbed, an effective technique that helps the brain minimize panic. The author praises Simpson for developing “two brains” in his emergency, one which kept tabs on the real conditions around him and the other which focused on following his body’s patterns and stayed in the moment (241). Simpson also employed positive thinking by considering the options available to him and making very short-term goals for himself, such as struggling out of the crevasse or clambering over one rock at a time.
Gonzales writes that the best survivors act as Simpson did and “always turn a bad situation into an advantage or at least an opportunity” (239). Furthermore, the author praises Simpson for doing “what all good survivors do: he laughed at himself,” which Gonzales claims is crucial for positivity and humility (242). This emphasizes how Simpson’s unwillingness to get down or disappointed is his ultimate survivor quality.
