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At the heart of storytelling and the retelling of a piece of history, writers have many choices when conveying the subject to readers after the fact. Jon Mooallen not only recounts the Great Alaska Earthquake of 1964 with clarity and well researched facts, but his telling it with Gene Chance as his main 'Character' and parallels to Thornton Wilder's "Our Town" with the book in three acts and references to the play with real people in Anchorage makes the story more compelling to the large themes of life. Knowing the play is important but not necessarily needed when reading this book. It's creative, living and deeply personal in many ways recounting the events of the Good Friday earthquake. Having worked on assignment for the Oregon National Guard in 2014 for the Vigilant Guard exercise that mirrored the 1964 earthquake, I experienced Alaska in my first trip as both a first-responder and as a military photojournalist. Finding this book and reading it over Easter Weekend (over 3 days), now nine years after that assignment, only makes the story resonate that much more for me personally. Really happy to have had this book recommend to me just a few months ago. There are some areas of redundancy that makes me feel like the writer already covered it well, but other than those places, the book is marvelous. ( )
Many a reader enjoys a lot of description, and so will enjoy how the first chapter opens, and the historical background chapters. I, not being one of those readers, skimmed quite a lot of the 84% that is the text of this book, slowing only for the earthquake and its aftermath.
I found the book's structure to be annoying. But, ultimately, I got out of it what I was after:
In a major disaster, people will go to work to rescue each other and make sure everyone's taken care of. It happens all the time. It's normal. The evidence was still being collected in 1964, but anyone who's been in group peril knows that our natural response to danger is to help. ( )
In March of 1964 a magnitude 9.2 earthquake occurred in Alaska. The earthquake was discovered to be a megathrust, also called an interplate earthquake. This classification of quake is the most powerful.
This book caught my eye because I have memories of this occurring. My father's sister, my God-Mother/Aunt, lived in Anchorage at the time. She had followed her son there, who was in the Air Force. I was hoping to stir my memories for more information on the quake and the aftermath.
The book, however, is more of a biography of a young woman, Genie Chance who was a radio reporter in Anchorage. I have no regrets reading it, I did get more information on the quake and learned about a strong woman working in, what at the time, was a male dominated career.
We get a glimpse of what life was like when Alaska was still a "new frontier". The population of Anchorage was exploding due to two things: the Army and Air Force bases installed there and the influx of people coming from the lower 48 states, seeking jobs and a new life. It could be classified as a big/small town. The community was growing, but the small town feeling and the atmosphere of "knowing your neighbor" was alive and well.
Jon Mooallem introduces us not only to Genie but also the community leaders and the "guy next door". He also explores the emotions and human side of what happens when there is an unexpected upheaval in your life.
Even while the earth was moving, the ferocious strangeness of what was happening to Anchorage was hard for people to internalize or accept.
But there are moments when the world we take for granted instantaneously changes; when reality is abruptly upended and the unimaginable overwhelms real life.
Also included in the story is the appearance of Ohio State's newest social research department. The Disaster Research Center had just become a part of the schools Sociology Department. The Alaska Quake was their first field study. The researchers were looking for clues as to what happens to the human mind when faced with disaster and how society functions, or how it falls apart.
Mooallem does a nice job of showing the domino of damage in cinematic slow motion — the crevasses opening in city streets, the land slinking and sliding, the indiscriminate collapse of homes of both the rich and the poor. And he’s astute in explaining the science ... He also brings to life a half-dozen or so ordinary people who acted in extraordinary ways ... this is a very strange book ... The main problem with This Is Chance! is that it fails to rise to the drama of the event.
Interweaving accounts of search-and-rescue operations with the story of a local production of Our Town staged the weekend after the earthquake, Mooallem delivers a moving tribute to the spirit of community in the face of disaster. This inspiring tale feels bound for the big-screen.
This is a story about how communities pulled together in the face of extreme adversity; while several people described throughout were also pivotal to the disaster relief and recovery process, Mooallem uses Genie Chance as the anchor and heart of the story ... A great crossover read for teens as well as adults about community, tenacity, and the power of one person to make a difference.
Mooallem seamlessly blends together a character study, an examination of the character of a community, a chronicle of what happened, and an inquiry into the human soul ... One finishes this book deeply impressed—with the people of Anchorage, with Genie Chance, and with the author.
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Now there are some things we all know, but we don't take'm out and look at'm very often. We all know that something is eternal And it ain't houses and it ain't names, and it ain't earth, and it ain't even the stars... everybody know in their bones that something is eternal, and that something has to do with human beings. -Out Town
Dédicace
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For Rose
Premiers mots
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This book is called This Is Chance!.... It tells the story of a single catastrophic weekend in a faraway town, and of the people who lived through it: ordinary women and men who - when the most powerful earthquake ever measured in North America struck, just before sundown on Good Friday, 1964 - found themselves thrown into a jumbled and ruthlessly unpredictable world they did not recognize.
Citations
Informations provenant du Partage des connaissances anglais.Modifiez pour passer à votre langue.
The name of the town is Anchorage, Alaska—a blotch of Western civilization in the middle of emptiness. In those days, the state of Alaska was still brand-new and often disregarded as a kind of free-floating addendum to the rest of America. But Anchorage was Alaska’s biggest and proudest city, a community whose “essential spirit,” one visitor wrote, “reached aggressively and greedily to grasp the future, impatient with any suggestion that such things take time.” It was a modern-day frontier town that imagined it was a metropolis, straining to make itself real.
A mix of aspiration and insecurity had started to color everything happening in Anchorage. Each new construction or business opening came to feel monumental—a bit more proof to people that their community was real. The new J. C. Penney building downtown, completed one year earlier, felt like an especially dignified arrival. It was one of the first major chain retailers to believe in Alaska enough to build in the state, and nothing, apparently, signaled a sophisticated civilization rising out of the wilderness like a five-story department store full of undergarments and blenders.
In retrospect, Genie was snared in a paradox a lot like the one in which the city of Anchorage found itself: insecure enough to feel like she still had something to prove, but also impatient, because she knew she was proving it. Even later, after the earthquake, when she became briefly famous around the world, The Washington Post would celebrate her as “an Alaskan housewife and mother of three children who does a man-sized job with a radio microphone.”
Small earthquakes were familiar occurrences in Alaska, yet all around Anchorage, the recognition of this one seemed to flower in people slowly, and meekly, arriving only at the tail end of some stupefied, time-stretching lag. The earthquake overwhelmed people the way the strongest emotions do. It was pure sensation, coming on faster than the intellect’s ability to register it.
Many people mistook the low growl of the churning earth for a nuclear bomb. Alaska, with its strategic location and military bases, had always been a presumptive Soviet target, and many residents now assumed the day had come: warheads were finally being lobbed at them from across the Bering Sea.
The improvisational, communal nature of the entire project communicated a kind of reassurance itself. Even people in Anchorage who were listening at home with their families, together and safe, found comfort in the sheer volume of announcements they were hearing on the air—all the people, one after another, calling in to report they were OK. You could hear the potential death toll in the city gradually ticking down. And with each small declaration of survival that aired, you could imagine a constellation of affirming flames slowly lighting the emptiness outside.
"The pain of broken buildings, shorn of their people, is almost beyond endurance.”
By the mid-seventies, though, Genie appeared to be finding some of the happiness and ease that had eluded her. And in the legislature, she was retroactively building the new world she’d expected to find in Alaska when she first arrived. “At the time she was doing what she was doing, it was incredible,” Brinkerhoff would remember. “She was giving younger women the opportunities she had missed. That’s the whole women’s movement, in a nutshell.” — THIS MIGHT HAVE BEEN a fairy-tale ending to Genie’s story. Except that story is fundamentally about the deceptiveness of such endings—the potential, given enough time, for circumstances that feel conclusive and stable to randomly come apart.
As Mooallem moved through Genie’s boxes, time itself started to seem like a slow-moving natural disaster, imperceptibly shaking everything apart. Maybe nothing in our world is durable or stable. Maybe everything runs on pure chance. He wondered how we are supposed to live on the surface of such unbearable randomness. What can we hold on to that’s fixed?
One of the agency’s animating insights was that a bomb dropped on the United States wouldn’t just cause physical destruction, but pandemonium. Civil Defense experts predicted “a mass outbreak of hysterical neurosis among the civilian population,” as one historian would put it. “Under this strain, many people would regress to an earlier level of needs and desires. They would behave like frightened and unsatisfied children.” Survivors would be panicked and powerless, but also aggressive and cruel—liberated into violence, left to compete for limited resources and food. It was up to Civil Defense to preemptively suppress that disorder, to guard against this self-inflicted second wave of any Soviet attack.
In the end, more than three hundred volunteers worked to reclaim an estimated quarter of a million dollars’ worth of property from more than thirty-eight different homes in Turnagain. That first Sunday, however, the homeowners remained skeptical. It took some convincing. Mostly, Scott would remember, people were shocked that anyone was so willing to help.
By the time Quarantelli finished his doctorate in 1959, he had learned to distrust documents and official narratives of any kind. They possessed a kind of problematic gravity, pulling at people’s memories of an experience and distorting them. After a dramatic event, it didn’t take long for people to begin revising their stories of it, if only subconsciously, to conform to their expectations of how it was supposed to have gone: in retrospect, decisions were always said to have been made methodically and by the appropriate people; smart decisions made by women during an emergency were frequently attributed to men.
“It’s there in front of you, so you do it,” Dolly Fleming would later explain; she could find no more substantive theory to account for all the cooperation she’d witnessed.
everybody in Anchorage had done a little bit of everything for everybody
Fritz claimed, the people in those ruined communities seemed pretty happy. There might even be “therapeutic effects” to disasters, he argued—and from there, his speculations grew even more radical: “As social animals,” he wrote, “people perhaps come closer to fulfilling their basic human needs in the aftermath of disaster than at any other time.” Fritz was arguing that disasters may bring out the best in human beings, rather than liberating some essential darkness in their nature. But at the time of the Good Friday Earthquake, Quarantelli was one of only a few people, even within the field of sociology, who would have been aware of that possibility. Fritz had written “Disasters and Mental Health” three years before the quake, as a chapter for an upcoming textbook. The book’s editors rejected it. The essay would not be published for another thirty-five years.
it would be stunning to recognize how much of what the sociologists had seen in Anchorage turned out to be characteristic of all disasters everywhere: People tended to act rationally, and even selflessly, rushing in to help like the crowds at the Public Safety Building. Mass hysteria was largely mythical, even though some entirely reasonable and effective responses to danger—like running, en masse, as fast as possible from a collapsing building—were easily mistaken for it. Looting was an exceedingly rare phenomenon after disasters, though paranoia about looting was always irrationally high. (In some cases, authorities are so overcome with worry about mass panic and looting that they preemptively clamp down on the public, even turning violently on innocent citizens who themselves aren’t actually panicked at all. Disaster scholars refer to this phenomenon as “elite panic.”) In short, our ugliest assumptions about human behavior would be almost uniformly rebuked by the ways actual humans behaved—again and again and again.
Eventually, it would be possible to look back on disaster after disaster and recognize that so many communities tended to interpret their own levelheaded and altruistic conduct as exceptional—New Orleanians being New Orleanians, or Puerto Ricans being Puerto Ricans—instead of wholly consistent with a half century of rigorous social science. It would be hard to accept that our goodness is ordinary.
Everywhere in Anchorage, clusters of ordinary people had gone to work immediately, spontaneously, teaming up and switching on like a kind of civic immune response.
That simplicity, and the spirit of possibility and togetherness it fostered, reminded many residents of the Alaska they’d first moved to, a decade earlier or more. Everyone in town trusted each other again, another man said: “Just like it used to be up here.”
Years later, Enrico Quarantelli would coauthor an article speculating about why the Disaster Research Center was documenting so little conflict in its studies of disaster-stricken communities around the world. In the paper, he compared a town coping with disaster to an audience watching a play. Like good theater, Quarantelli wrote, “disasters do not involve mundane matters but often the very issue of human life itself.” These themes, usually dormant in daily life, suddenly spill out in public for all to see. An unrelenting immediacy sets in: “Worries about the past and future are unrealistic when judged against the realities of the moment.” And distinctions between people fall away, leaving only “human beings responding to one another as human beings…As a consequence, all those who share in the experience are brought together in a very powerful psychological sense, by their common participation in such a dramatic event. To victims, the disaster is ‘our’ disaster.”
Derniers mots
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The binder Mooallem was holding was full of paper - thicker, even, than the book in your hands - but the rest of those pages were blank.
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