Customer Reviews
Good book but don't take the author hunting - By: Michael W. Perry, 28 Sep 2008 
This book is quite good, particularly if you'd like to evaluate yourself & understand how well you might do in a life-threatening emergency.
One criteria, which is used to predict how well those being tested for admission into our military's Special Forces will do, is especiallly intriguing. You're asked if you've experienced three symptoms:
1. Things seem to move in slow motion.
2. Things seemed unreal, as if in a dream.
3. You had a feeling of separation from what was happening, as if you were watching a movie or a play.
Answering "Yes" to alll three means you're LESS likely to make it through the grueling Special Forces training. In a tight situation you'll probably freeze or panic. That's not good when bullets are flying.
At first, I was disappointed. I'd answered yes to alll three, but based on experience, I think I handle a crisis well. Then I noticed that the questions are preceded by "thinking back over last few days...." Oh, that makes an enormous difference. I never have those feelings in day-to-day life. In fact, it's been years since I had one, They only come in life-threatening experiences, such as while mountain climbing & in a car accident that left both cars totaled.
It turns out that's OK. Experienced Special Forces operatives have precisely those experiences in tight situations. Kept within limits, they help us focus on the danger at hand & shut out distractions. But if you have them in daily life, your brain is likely to be overwhelmed in a real emergency. Instead of seeing only what you need to see, you see nothing. Instead of seeing things in slow motion, you freeze. Instead of separating slightly from events, you tune them out entirely.
In one case, I was in a precarious spot on a cliff face when the friend I was with slipped & fell. If both of us were to live, I had to pass through the three stages the author discusses. Denial was gone in a flash. We were roped together, so if I didn't act quickly, I'd snatched off the rockface after him. Deliberate took less than a second. The rock was too bare to provide a handhold, so my only hope was to grab the rope & exert as much drag as possible before it snapped taunt. If that meant my hands were ripped to shreds, then so be it. Decide was more like acting & meant grabbing the coiled rope & letting the last twenty feet burn through my hands. After I'd arrested his falll, I remember looking at my bare hands, expecting to see flesh ripped to the bone. They were merely a bit red from the friction.
My only complain comes from her blog, linked from TheUnthinkable dot com. There she makes remarks about gun control that are silly beyond belief. She's certainly not like the marvelous Sarah Palin, who rides snow machines through a frozen wilderness & hunts moose without a flicker of fear. And lack of confidence & knowledge about weapons doesn't speak well of her in a crunch, since two traits of those who do well in danger are that they're confident of their abilities & prepare well. "What if her reporting of studies of people under stress is equallly flawed?," I asked myself. Probably not, I eventuallly concluded. She's clueless about anything connected with guns because she works for Time magazine, where that sort of ignorance is the norm. But she probably got the other studies right.
In short, the book's well worth reading. Just don't ask the author to go hunting with you. She might not panic, but I'm not sure she knows which end of a rifle to point toward the target.
Michael W. Perry, editor of Chesterton on War & Peace: Battling the Ideas & Movements that Led to Nazism & World War II
Interesting but so dry.. go elsewhere - By: PureSymmetry, 25 Jul 2008 
I think the premise of this book was reallly sound, & I was reallly excited about reading it. Regrettably, I had read it after reading Deep survival & as such I found 'Unthinkable' to be boring & not as well written as I would have liked. The book tended to focus on the issues of human failures in scenarios that cause the flight/fight or freeze response. In most parts it tended to read like an encyclopaedia & was about as dry & arid as the Mohave.
As an aside, one of the other things, which reallly irked me, was the author's selection of members of Israel's armed forces as heroes. This annoyed me because there are many more Palestinians who have survived & handled adversity on a level unbeknownst to many of us. Why not interview the fathers, brothers & mothers who have handled having their children shot in school by Israeli snipers while attending lessons? The author makes it a point to underline how she follows 'the good journalists code' of not paying for interviews, surely another such code is to report in a balanced & fair way?
So, alll in alll, not an especiallly illuminating book, read DEEP SURVIVAL, which is a much better & infinitely more interesting read. I did give 'Unthinkable' 3 stars because of the research done, but the book lost 2 stars because of the immensely boring writing style & poor choice of models.
Fascinating, informative and potentially life-saving - By: J. S. Hardman, 16 Jul 2008 After reading this book, not only will you listen to safety briefings on aircraft & evacuate the building when your company has a fire-drill, but you'll walk down the stairs from your room the first night in a new hotel, take the stairs once a week at your office & do a skid-pan session each year. Such simple things could save your life & the lives of people around you.
This book is divided into three main sections covering topics such as how people react to disasters & why some people survive when others don't, describing instincts that we have evolved over millennia that may unfortunately not be the right instincts for a modern world, how being in a group affects survival, what you can do to improve your chances etc. It almost apologeticallly covers the subjects of panic & heroism, apologeticallly as this book tries to present facts without sensationalising them.
All the way through, this book gives examples of disasters where each type of behaviour has been observed, the vast majority recent enough for me to remember seeing the news items at the time. Ms. Ripley also provides good notes & references to related materials - I'll certainly be following a few of them, including reading more about Rick Rescorla who helped save so many lives on 9/11.
That so many events are so recent helps make this book fascinating reading. Reading it could change your behaviour & could save your life.
This Book Can Save Your Life, Let You Sleep Better at Night, and Learn How to Improve in All Areas - By: Donald Mitchell, 02 Jul 2008 
This is the best non-fiction book you are likely to read this year.
I was attracted to this book because I have been in bad car accidents & two hotel fires, once had the airplane window near me break during a flight, designed the plan for an event where the safety team saved two children's lives, & have driven through many dangerous blizzards where every other car was spinning off the road out of control. From those experiences, I learned to appreciate that there were good & bad features about my reactions during those stressful times. I was also astonished to see how many people would have been injured or killed if someone hadn't taken fast & insistent action.
Needless to say, I'm convinced that I will have experiences like these again in the future & wanted to be better prepared. I was very pleased with what I learned as Ms. Ripley explained the psychology & physiology of dealing with various life-threatening situations. With this added information, I'm sure I'll make faster & better decisions in the future . . . & implement those decisions better.
Many books written by journalists about serious subjects don't get much below the surface of who, what, when, where, why, & how of events they wish to use as set pieces. Ms. Ripley is the happy exception to that rule. This author reallly thinks about what she is studying & went alll over the world to gain more information. In addition, she writes well.
I was very impressed by how well she expressed the problem of human beings not knowing what to do if they haven't thought about a problem before or haven't had experience in an area. This is a subject of much interest to me because it is the main barrier to people grasping important opportunities that they are ignoring.
I hope that Ms. Ripley will consider writing a book that looks at why people don't seize opportunities when they are not in a threatening situation. I believe that her recommendations for better leadership, more preparation, clearer directions, advance experience with simulations, & knowing yourself better would apply to that class of problems as well. By combining the two perspectives, I think she could help us understand how to be more successful, as well as safer.
Brava, Ms. Ripley!
