Blind Descent: The Quest to Discover the Deepest Place on Earth. James
M. Tabor. Random House, New York; 2010. ISBN 978-1-4000-6767-1. 6 by 9
inches, 286 pages, hardbound. $26.00. (Amazon will rent you the
privilege of reading it on a Kindle for 90 percent of what they charge
for the real book. They can't be serious. The ISBN of the eBook
edition is 978-1-58836-944-9.)
That guy should be on drugs. To judge by the fifty-three very short
chapters in this book, he has an attention-deficit disorder. He ends
the tiny chapters with cliff-hangers, many of them contrived. He
easily gets overexcited. Everything is super—supercaves and
supercavers, terminology I hope doesn't catch on. Sometimes he is
completely out of control. Cavers don't go about "banging like human
wrecking balls into rock faces."
This book is about the quest for world-record-deep caves and
especially about the men who have been the principal leaders in the
explorations of Sistemas Huautla and Cheve in Oaxaca, Mexico, and
Krubera Cave in Abkhasia, Republic of Georgia (or not, depending on
your politics). With regard to both caves and leaders, the goal of the
author was to "compare and contrast," like a feared college essay
assignment. The first half of the book is about Bill Stone and the
Mexican projects through 2003, and part 2, much shorter, is on
Alexander Klimchouk and the exploration of Krubera through the same
year. This is especially welcome, because relatively little has been
published in English about that project. Part 3 covers the
expeditions of both teams in 2004, which is when the book really ends,
although a short afterword updates things somewhat. The Mexican caves
were and still are essentially tied at about 1480 meters deep. Krubera
turned out to be the deepest _known_ cave by a good measure, at 2,191
meters. We will probably never be sure where the "deepest place on
earth" really is, although Krubera will be hard to beat. There is a
sixteen-page insert of color photos, including one that includes my
decidedly non-supercaver self, but the book is otherwise not
illustrated.
I never did get used to Tabor's giving all the dimensions of caves in
Mexico and Europe in feet, but I suppose it might be appropriate for
the unsophisticated audience for whom the book clearly was written. Of
greater concern are the errors or half-truths for effect. A few of
them are significant. There was not, in fact, a lot of digging
involved in pushing Cueva Charco, near Cheve. It was misleading to
write that Chris Yeager's body was hauled out of Cheve in three days;
the whole recovery project took two weeks. More of them are merely
annoying. Abkhasia is not in southeastern Georgia. It is actually at
the opposite end of that country. The names of the first team to
reach Saknussemm's Well in Cueva Cheve are wrong. Cheve's Camp 2 is
not 3.1 miles from the entrance. The correct distance is 2.3 miles
(3.7 kilometers). This list could be extended past the point of tedium.
There are a lot more things that are right than wrong, of course, and
the subject is a fascinating and, yes, exciting one. While Tabor's
enthusiasm for the triumphs is sometimes over the top, problems and
controversies have not been whitewashed. I can't say that the
principal characters are seriously misrepresented. The general public
will get an only mildly distorted view of some hard-core exploration
unfamiliar to most of them, and cavers will enjoy reading it, as long
as they're not expecting more than a lightweight writer careless of
facts and more than a little given to hyperbole.--—Bill Mixon
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You can live down anything but a good reputation.
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