Gonzales attempts to answer the question of why, in life threatening events, do some people survive and others die? In a series of true-life stories about people who have had skills and behaviors of “miraculous endurance” or who have met “sudden death,” Gonzales describes how people get into life threatening jams and how some of them survive and how some of them roll over and die. The book is divided into two parts, the first is titled “How Accidents Happen” and the second part, “Survival”. Using not only anecdotal stories, but research from neuroscience, psychology, and decision making, Gonzales furthers understanding of the often-times deadly experiences and decision making survival techniques of pilots, sailors, and mountain climbers, among many others. Showing how the “stages of survival” are important, he describes how many survivors had to deviate from plans and to improvise, on the fly, methods of surviving. This is an excellent book to benchmark one’s own risky endeavors against, see how one would survive and endure, benchmark one’s mental agilities and resilience against those who have survived, and begin a personal process of creating one’s own repertoire of survival techniques.