Laurence Gonzales

Discusses how modern society makes people lazy and susceptible to threats if their curiosity, awareness, and attention are put aside in favor of a mental script that does not process natural laws and the physical requirements of a situation when survival is at stake.

[Laurence Gonzales's] writing is not so much about a subject; it comes from within the subject. He steps out on the wire, or onto the scaffolding of a skyscraper, and grapples with the essence of the human act. Whether he is on a Coast Guard cutter hunting drug dealers off the Cuban coast, upside down in a stunt plane at three thousand feet, on an oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico, or landing on a heaving aircraft carrier deck in the middle of the ocean, he always becomes one with worlds that are hidden from ordinary life. And the reader becomes one with the vigorous, astonishing, and masterful prose. These essays beat with a life all their own.

The author's third novel. His grandfather was in the Mexican revolution and this is a story based on what his grandfather told him as well as extensive research.

Jenny Lowe, a primatologist studying chimpanzees, is running for her life with the child of a murdered fellow scientist after a civil war explodes. Jenny grabbing the notebooks of the primatologist who's been killed. She brings the girl to Chicago to await the discovery of her relatives. The girl is fifteen and lovely, her name is Lucy. Realizing that the child has no living relatives, Jenny begins to care for her as her own. When she reads the notebooks written by Lucy's father, she discovers that the adorable, lovely, magical Lucy is the result of an experiment. She is part human, part ape, a hybrid human being.

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.