This Is Chance!: The Shaking of an All-American City, a Voice That Held It Together

by Jon Mooallem

At times, there seemed to be too much. It was obvious there were far more stories than Mooallem could hope to write, and at some point, the excitement he felt at each new discovery became tinged with discouragement, or even guilt. One evening, he was finishing an interview with a former Anchorage resident, Nancy Yaw Davis, when she handed him, almost as an afterthought, her four-hundred-page anthropological dissertation documenting the experiences of people in Kaguyak and Old Harbor, two of the Native villages obliterated that weekend by tsunamis. The study, which Davis had never been able to publish, was so exhaustive and granular that it included hand-drawn maps of where in the village each individual had been that Good Friday before the quake, and what he or she had been doing: “Babysitting,” “Duck hunting,” “Playing Monopoly.”