Sigh. I know what book I WANTED. It focused on the 33 miners. Each one of them got a name and a story and a family. Some of them were brothers and one of them liked Elvis and lots of them liked to play dominoes and one of them was an awesome Colonel Potter type who got everyone to do what they were supposed to and not turn on each other and not ask for an extra serving of canned tuna. Sometimes the story would cut to the rescue operation above and the waiting families, but mostly you'd be down in the mine, and then everyone gets brought up one by one and shakes the president's hand while wearing some rad Oakleys.

This is not that book. It would have been if Jon Krakauer had written it. Let's have a moment of silence for the book Jon Krakauer will never write about the 33.

.....................

I'm not a big fan of Aronson's writing. He likes to insert himself in the narrative and I don't dig that, and also makes leaps in his similes. When you say "More recently, in Rick Riordan's The Lightning Thief", you date your book. Plus it's just kind of weird. There's other stuff about bronze and copper that feels extraneous, and an awful lot of references to Greek mythology that didn't seem to add anything. Get back to those miners.

So even though no one has any responsibility to write the book I wanted instead of the book he wrote, I just didn't think this was great. The flopping between "above" and "below" wasn't smooth. Most of the photographs were really dull visually. I imagine there must have been licensing issues. Worst of all, the ending, the day of the rescue, is hardly given any development. Just a thing about how a strong guy had to go first and the captain came up last. NO DRAMA, and drama is what that day was all about, and it was awesome. But instead the book ends on a very flat note.

I'm glad he points out that miners still work in bad conditions all over the place and lots of them never get rescued. The rest of the back stuff feels extraneous, especially the lengthy thing about how HARD it was to write this because it's practically current events. Authors love to put in stuff about their PROCESS at the end of books now.

Also, the list of people he interviewed seems weird. In that he didn't talk to anyone from Chile at all. I expect it is hard, or perhaps impossible, to get access to the miners themselves. But surely... And couldn't the reason WHY he didn't talk to anyone from Chile have appeared somewhere in that long process note, seeing as it's already there? Speaking of which, does anyone really affectionately refer to the Internet as "the Net" anymore?

All three stars for the parts with the miners in.