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…

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 ren…

"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 t…

A traumatic or near-death experience can change every aspect of the survivor's being. It can erase the body's learned adaptations, and in some cases, those who live through such a shock suffer more in the aftermath than they did during the actual cr…

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 exce…