The Survivors Club: The Secrets and Science that Could Save Your Life

A fair defense of the book might be that it was not intended as a survival manual so much as stories of survival. Many such anecdotes fill the book some of which are marginally interesting such as a depressed young man who survived a dive from the Golden Gate Bridge and a chubby woman who accidently stabs herself through the heart with a knitting needle. Again, airplane crashes dominate with the retelling of somewhat familiar tales including the infamous 1972 crash of a plane in the Andes detailed in the film “Alive”, United flight 232 which nearly landed despite losing all hydraulic control and, of course, the crashes of September 11, 2001.

If splashy airplane crashes are one obsession of middling value in the book, religion is another. Sherwood devotes chapters to faith and the scientific and anecdotal evidence of its value in survival. Indeed, the substantiation of the importance of faith to survival presented in the book is compelling but what practical strategy does it suggest? Readers likely already have some measure or lack of faith and one doubts whether trying to enhance that because of the book seems morally ethnical. It seems clear Sherwood harbors a deep religious faith particularly when he reports that Methuselah of Christian bible fame lived to be 969 years old without reference to this perhaps being allegorical. Sherwood also seems to be less than skeptical on other points as well. The book reports as fact the story of a 110 pound grandmother lifting a 3400 pound Chevy off her grandson. Such urban legends fail to account for the fact that the thickest human bones snap at 800 pounds of pressure no matter how much adrenaline they may be exposed to at the time.

As a reporter by trade, Sherwood’s prose is smart and lively. He somewhat excessively employs the use of cliff-hangers to pivot away from a tense description of survival (such as a pilot who ejected going faster than Mach 1 and somehow managed to survive the wind blast, fall, landing in the cold ocean and waiting for rescue) to less interesting scientific information such as the mechanics of how ejector seats work. To a degree Sherwood has a taste for describing the gory details of the price of survival which may appeal to readers who also have seen every “Saw” movie sequel but may turn off more sensitive readers.

In short, anyone anxious on the airplane will find much to recommend in the book while other readers will find it more hit and near-miss (pun intended).