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The 33. Jonathan Franklin (2011)

by Jonathan Franklin(Favorite Author)

3.75 of 5 Votes: 2

ISBN

0552777560 (ISBN13: 9780552777568)

languge

English

genre

Memoir & Autobiography

publisher

Black Swan Books, Limited

review 1: I remember hearing about the Chilean miners and watching them as they were rescued. There's a lot, though, that I either didn't know or had forgotten. The author does a great job of giving the story immediacy and ramps up the tension as the miners become trapped. I thought it was fascinating to see how the miners coped (or didn't cope) with their circumstances and how they ultimately joined together to survive. I was especially interested in the first 17 days before they were able to get supplies from above ground. Then after supplies and some creature comforts started arriving, how their order and unity started dissolving. The middle of the book bogs down a bit as we wait for the bores to reach the miners. We're more than ready for the rescue when it comes. All in all... more, though, the book is very readable and it's an important human story about how much humans can endure while still maintaining their humanity.Content: a few F-words and a few sexual references, more clinical than anything else.
review 2: At its heart, the story of the thirty-three men who survived 69 days trapped at the bottom of a Chilean mine is a compelling one - but that story is not particularly well told in this book. Franklin has a talent for bombast; it's easy to imagine a movie announcer annunciating the book's early pages. ("In a world gone mad . . . ") Is this the story of thirty-three men who worked together to overcome tremendous odds? Or is it the story of thirty-three men who splintered and formed cliques and didn't get along? Franklin wants it to be both, despite the fact that the stories are contradictory, and that was one of my major frustrations with the book.There's a lot of information about drilling in this book. If drilling is your thing, and you enjoy information about schematics and bits and the challenges of boring a hole through several different kinds of rock, this is the book for you. For me, those sections were uninteresting, and I wanted much, much more information about the men in the mine. What information we did get was hard to fathom. Why does Franklin bring up the "specter" of the men engaging in homosexual behavior when he has no evidence to corroborate that supposition? It seems like the worst kind of baiting, and - in the way that it was written - not a little homophobic.My favorite parts of the book were those dealing with the medical and psychological challenges of surviving the mine. No one on earth had any experience dealing with the kind of isolation the miners were experiencing - only astronauts had any kind of similar experience. NASA was called in to provide expertise; psychologists made various choices about how to manage the miners as the rescue operation took place. This was fascinating stuff, and I wish there had been more of it, and fewer details about machines. less

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