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Blind Descent: The Quest to Discover the Deepest Place on Earth
written by James M. Tabor
Studio : Random House
by Random House
Release Date : 2010-06-15
Publisher : Random House
Released : 2010-06-15
Availability : Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Number of Items : 1
EAN : 9781400067671
Avg. Customer Rating: (based on 55 reviews)
List Price : $26.00
Our Price : $11.50
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ISBN13: 9781400067671
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Condition: New
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Notes: BUY WITH CONFIDENCE, Over one million books sold! 98% Positive feedback. Compare our books, prices and service to the competition. 100% Satisfaction Guaranteed
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Product Description |
The deepest cave on earth was a prize that had remained unclaimed for centuries, long after every other ultimate discovery had been made: both poles by 1912, Everest in 1958, the Challenger Deep in 1961. In 1969 we even walked on the moon. And yet as late as 2000, the earth’s deepest cave—the supercave—remained undiscovered. This is the story of the men and women who risked everything to find it, earning their place in history beside the likes of Peary, Amundsen, Hillary, and Armstrong.
In 2004, two great scientist-explorers are attempting to find the bottom of the world. Bold, heroic American Bill Stone is committed to the vast Cheve Cave, located in southern Mexico and deadly even by supercave standards. On the other side of the globe, legendary Ukrainian explorer Alexander Klimchouk—Stone’s polar opposite in temperament and style, but every bit his equal in scientific expertise, physical bravery, and sheer determination—has targeted Krubera, a freezing nightmare of a supercave in the Republic of Georgia, where underground dangers are compounded by the horrors of separatist war in this former Soviet republic.
Blind Descent explores both the brightest and darkest aspects of the timeless human urge to discover—to be first. It is also a thrilling epic about a pursuit that makes even extreme mountaineering and ocean exploration pale by comparison. These supercavers spent months in multiple camps almost two vertical miles deep and many more miles from their caves’ exits. They had to contend with thousand-foot drops, deadly flooded tunnels, raging whitewater rivers, monstrous waterfalls, mile-long belly crawls, and much more. Perhaps even worse were the psychological horrors produced by weeks plunged into absolute, perpetual darkness, beyond all hope of rescue, including a particularly insidious derangement called The Rapture.
James M. Tabor was granted unprecedented access to logs, journals, photographs, and video footage of these expeditions, as well as many hours of personal interviews with surviving participants. Blind Descent is an unforgettable addition to the classic literature of discovery and adventure. It is also a testament to human survival and endurance—and to two extraordinary men whose relentless pursuit of greatness led them to heights of triumph and depths of tragedy neither could have imagined.
Includes a 16-pg full-color insert |
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Satellitetvsports.com Review |
Satellitetvsports Best Books of the Month, June 2010: Set in impenetrable darkness, James M. Tabor's Blind Descent is as awe-inspiring as any adventure story above ground. Tabor's claustrophobic and pulse-pounding narrative follows two of the world's premier cavers--American Bill Stone and Ukrainian Alexander Klimchouk--as they race to explore Earth's deepest caves, swimming through steering wheel-sized tunnels and scaling rock walls slick with spring runoff. Caving is dirty and dangerous work, and Tabor pulls no punches in describing the many terrifying hazards that cavers face underground, including falling rocks, hypothermia, starvation, nitrogen narcosis, hallucinations, hypoxia, and deadly anxiety attacks. He captures the eerie mixture of excitement and horror that accompanies life in extreme environments, while shedding light on the ineffable and complex moral code that governs men and women in places where survival is hoped for, but never guaranteed. Blind Descent is a captivating summer read for adventure seekers and armchair adrenaline junkies alike. --Lynette Mong
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A Tale of Exploration and Bravery in the Deep Parts of the Earth |
I'm a big fan of any sort of non-fiction book about the survival ability of human beings in extreme environments. I've read books about Everest, Antarctica, the Satellitetvsports, and Outer Space... and now I will be adding 'inner space' to the list. And it turns out that this story of deep caves and the people who feel the need to explore them is one of the most exciting books that I have ever read! I couldn't stop turning pages, late into the night, until I finished this one.
Blind Descent follows the journey of two high profile 'cavers': Bill Stone of America and Alexander Klimchouk from the Ukraine. We hear about their struggles through deadly cave networks, their drive to push their expeditions deeper through personal risk, scientific research, and almost unimaginable bravery. This book is filled with harsh stories of how dangerous these supercaves can truly be. The almost alien cave world is well described, and I really did feel at times that my dark bedroom illuminated by Kindle light was actually some cavern chamber thousands of feet below the Earth. Thankfully I don't have to worry about navigating a 500 foot cliff or scuba diving my way through a pitch black world of sudden dead-ends and surprise waterfalls. I have nothing but respect for the cavers in this book.
If you're into tales of exploration at all, then I'd highly recommend this book. I don't have many negative comments at all. The only thing I can think of is that there are some photos in the Kindle edition of this book, but the small black and white doesn't really do these supercaves justice - so I went online to check out a bunch of photos. I'd highly recommend doing this if you get into the book.
UPDATE: I just noticed that Bill Stone (one of the major players in this book) did a talk about cave exploration on TED. It's really interesting and provides a bunch of cool visuals. Here's the link if you want to check it out:
[...] |
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Compulsive venturing in "Depths ot the Earth" |
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Some men (and a few women) dare to venture into the outer reaches of our universe and return with exciting tales of their voyages. That is true of an explorer whose adventures are recounted in this amply annotated account of exploring Mother Earth. The explorer whetted his appetite by probing some of Austin Texas' caves and became a man possessed with the idea of reaching the earth's deepest possible level. His passion resulted in death-defying blind descents by his teams into cavernous places never before seen by man. This is truly a great vicarious adventure for armchair readers as well as younger folks who dream of "going where no man (or woman) has dared to go before" .... right here on earth! |
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A matter of taste |
I enjoyed _Blind Descent_. Had James Tabor made some different choices, I might have enjoyed it more. Or, to put the shoe on the other foot, I might have enjoyed it more had I been the kind of reader that Tabor is aiming for.
The book opens with a bang, and it's fast-paced and extremely vivid. Tabor puts a lot of emphasis on the "extreme" nature of supercaving--the cold, the dark, the hardship, the danger, the obsession. At first this is eye-opening. As the book goes on, however, the same points are driven home over and over. I can see how some readers might savor that aspect; for a non-extreme reader like me, though, the repetition eventually builds up. (It makes the whole caving process sound less like an adventure and more like an underground Gulag.) By contrast, you won't find much in here about the beauties of the underground world or the science of caves. That's just not what Tabor is interested in.
A related choice is that the book is unbalanced. There are nominally two principal cavers racing each other: Bill Stone and Alexander Klimchouk. Tabor gives a good, fair, interesting portrait of Klimchouk, but it's clear that his heart is with Stone. Klimchouk doesn't even make an appearance until page 156 (of 250), and even then he has to share the remaining page count with his American counterpart. The reason, I suppose, is that Stone is vastly more colorful, and fits better with Tabor's muscular storyline. (And I give Tabor credit, as well, for a nuanced and objective character portrait of his larger-than life protagonist.)
Even so, I think Tabor would have been better off interleaving the two characters and their stories. For one thing, he often resorts to a well-known writer's device--building tension by ending a chapter at some moment of tension or peril. That suspense-building device, though, really only works well if the writer follows it by cutting away to a different storyline for a while. As it is, all the reader does is turn the page and the tension is immediately dissipated.
Finally, there are moments where Tabor's macho subject matter and vigorous prose style combine to become pretty ... let's say "dramatic". Here's a quote (p. 111) that I think fairly represents those moments:
"By that time, Stone's anger had cooled and his ardor had warmed. Their celebrations included some postprandial activity that guaranteed that even if the cave did not set a record for depth, they'd established one of their own in Camp 6."
If you like those sentences, I'd say you should disregard my reservations and buy _Blind Descent_. If not, you might still like the book if you're interested in the subject matter. I am, and I did (though my favorite caving book is still Roger Brucker and Richard Watson's _The Longest Cave_). But you should be prepared for some melodramatic prose, in a men's-magazine kind of way. |
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Fascinated Horror |
I had no idea what cavers actually do, but being a fan of mountain climbing books, I decided to give this a go. I read the descriptions of caving exploits in fascinated horror. The whole endeavor seems to involve facing and reveling in all of the most basic fears--fear of the dark, fear of heights, claustrophobia, and basically fear of death. I can't imagine how anyone could enjoy (if that's even the right word) such feats. If mountain climbing is a little hard to really justify, in terms of human lives lost, extreme caving is almost impossible to grasp.
But I give the book 5 stars. The author made the unimaginable clear and vivid to my mind. He skips rather lightly over the rappelling, which involves sliding down ropes into the pitch dark often through raging waterfalls. But his descriptions of diving actually made me feel the claustrophobia, the terror, the unbelievable danger involved. And what more can you ask of good writing?
And he did as much as anyone could to help me get a feel for the personalities of the men and women who engage in this extreme endeavor.
But if you feel a little choked up or panicky in the lowest level of an underground parking garage, this will probably not be the hobby--or the book--for you! |
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The Subject Matter is really the star here |
I posted a reply to the 1 Star review, and decided to write my own review and include it here since comments to reviews don't get read much.
I didn't like the author's writing style, if somoene else had written the same story and kept up the tension, it would have been a better read. There is plenty of places for dramatic tension with people dying and barely escaping death, for that. If you want a dry academic text, I have to say the author isn't boring enough.
Anyhow some folks were put off by the author citing the Flat Earth, and that he never went into a cave himself, and the the book written off personal accounts and articles would be full of bias and myth. What follows is my reply to those folks.
If you read the book, I listened to the unabridged audiobook, you would know that Tabor talked a lot about his sources and you would know that some folks in the caving community had no love for Bill Stone. He mentions articles and interviews that were quite unflattering, to Stone.
I think there is a lot of negative press on Stone that was mentioned in passing, as well as some of the positive press, most of that is background to the personal accounts. The people that think Stone was reckless and people died on his watch weren't part of his later expeditions so focussing too much on them wouldn't benefit the story. I believe I got a reasonable account of the 30+ year story, and there were enough expedition journals and computer logs to make the veracity of any of the hard data difficult to fake. So the accounts are good enough for what you're getting here.
What I couldn't stand was Tabor's writing style, that guy never met a cliche he didn't like. So I agree with the 1 Star reviewer's comment that the flourishes of prose bothered the hell out of me.
If you had read the book you would know that this kind of cave diving is hard enough it would have taken the author years of training to not be a liability on any expedition, and since the book covers 30 years in 2 countries, which expeditions would the reviewer have wanted him to go on. Its certainly possible to write a passable book on the subject without having done it all yourself.
In the first chapter the author tried way too hard out to make the case Cave Divers were like Ocean Navigators of Old, Mountain Climbers of Everest, South Pole explorers and Astronauts all rolled into one. There are parallels, and NASA is doing some work with Cave Explorers, but in the intro it's just too forced, but don't let that put you off an otherwise enjoyable book. |
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