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Ohenrypacey

It's Just, Like, My Opinion, Man.

A way for me to remember what I've read, when I've read it, and what I thought about it at the time.

Currently reading

1914-1918: The History of the First World War
David Stevenson
e: the Story of a Number
Eli Maor

Blind Descent: The Quest to Discover the Deepest Place on Earth

Blind Descent: The Quest to Discover the Deepest Place on Earth - James M. Tabor An interesting subject nearly ruined by the writer's hyberbolic style. There was never a 'race' to find the world's deepest cave; what there was was a dedicated Ukrainian caving society exploring the world's deepest cave, and an intrepid megalomaniacal american caver trying to establish a mexican cave as the world's deepest (it's not even in the top 5) over the same 25 yr. period, whose story the author desperately wanted to tell. Both stories were interesting, and a better writer would have found a way to weave in the story of, perhaps, some of the other european speleologists who were establishing true records during this time as well, or interwoven the stories he was telling a bit more tightly so that the timelines of the two explorations would seem more akin to the race he was trying to make us believe was occurring.Tabor's prose is so full of hackneyed exaggeration that it's almost laughable at times how hard he tries to make every single scene a matter of life or death (we get it, caving is dangerous). He even resorts to ending every one of his 50 odd chapters with a sort of artificial cliff hanger, just to perpetuate the endless,and ultimately defeating, sense of impending doom that never materializes.