No matter how easy it is for a reader of these tales to shake their head in disbelief at how brazenly obvious the impending disaster was, Gonzales always drives home the point that this is the very nature of such accidents. Just as in everyday life while performing some trivial task, the same litany of factors influence every decision while rappelling down a steep slope. From peer pressure, the desire to impress, laziness, tiredness, daydreaming...the reasons are multitude. Of course the potential consequences are much more deadly but that is readily apparent. That you haven't ever experienced such a situation and thus are lacking the mental map to respond and which inhibits your ability to survive is what is key.

Or as Gonzalez opines on the word 'experienced': "(it) often refers to someone who's gotten away with doing the wrong thing more frequently than you have."

Just as a few conditions need to come together to set the stage for disaster, the absence of such conditions convince many that they know what they are doing when in reality they have been blundering along at some weekend past-time from the beginning, lucking into their string of "successes". That more fuck-ups don't occur is what is so surprising.

This book is jammed with shrewd insight and well-articulated hypotheses and observations. It's one of those books that takes you a while to read--not because there is any lack of desire to keep plowing through the pages--but because it continually hammers you into a reverie and forces you to stare off into the distance and ponder something that the author has so perfectly highlighted.

For some, Gonzalez may go a bit too far in the early going as he establishes the concept and poses the questions that make up the running theme of the book. Nothing he writes goes so far as to be called filler, and though extrapolation is the stock in trade of non-fiction writers, in an attempt to ensure the big idea is lost on no reader, he sometimes adds more than necessary in those early chapters. It is clear that this is a topic that is dear to his heart, something so intimately intriguing to him that he has essentially devoted his life to experiencing, observing and writing about it.

Another thread running through the book is the author's own personal experiences as well as those of his father, who flew during WWII as a bomber pilot. Usually a clear writer of crisp passages and memorable lines, only occasionally does he add unnecessary throwaway lines such as:

"When I first heard that story, I almost wept, because it seemed so much like me and my father."