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Home > Blind Descent: The Quest to Discover the Deepest Place on Earth
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Blind Descent: The Quest to Discover the Deepest Place on Earth
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By James M. Tabor
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 (109 Reviews)
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Publisher:
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Random House
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Edition:
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First Edition
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Published:
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December 31, 1969 |
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Binding:
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Hardcover
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Pages:
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304
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The deepest cave on earth was a prize that had remained unclaimed for centuries, long after every other ultimate discovery had been made: both poles by 1912, Everest in 1958, the Challenger Deep in 1961. In 1969 we even walked on the moon. And yet as late as 2000, the earth?s deepest cave?the supercave?remained undiscovered. This is the story of the men and women who risked everything to find it, earning their place in history beside the likes of Peary, Amundsen, Hillary, and Armstrong.
In 2004, two great scientist-explorers are attempting to find the bottom of the world. Bold, heroic American Bill Stone is committed to the vast Cheve Cave, located in southern Mexico and deadly even by supercave standards. On the other side of the globe, legendary Ukrainian explorer Alexander Klimchouk?Stone?s polar opposite in temperament and style, but every bit his equal in scientific expertise, physical bravery, and sheer determination?has targeted Krubera, a freezing nightmare of a supercave in the Republic of Georgia, where underground dangers are compounded by the horrors of separatist war in this former Soviet republic.
Blind Descent explores both the brightest and darkest aspects of the timeless human urge to discover?to be first . It is also a thrilling epic about a pursuit that makes even extreme mountaineering and ocean exploration pale by comparison. These supercavers spent months in multiple camps almost two vertical miles deep and many more miles from their caves? exits. They had to contend with thousand-foot drops, deadly flooded tunnels, raging whitewater rivers, monstrous waterfalls, mile-long belly crawls, and much more. Perhaps even worse were the psychological horrors produced by weeks plunged into absolute, perpetual darkness, beyond all hope of rescue, including a particularly insidious derangement called The Rapture.
James M. Tabor was granted unprecedented access to logs, journals, photographs, and video footage of these expeditions, as well as many hours of personal interviews with surviving participants. Blind Descent is an unforgettable addition to the classic literature of discovery and adventure. It is also a testament to human survival and endurance?and to two extraordinary men whose relentless pursuit of greatness led them to heights of triumph and depths of tragedy neither could have imagined.
Includes a 16-pg full-color insert
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Amazon Best Books of the Month, June 2010: Set in impenetrable darkness, James M. Tabor's Blind Descent is as awe-inspiring as any adventure story above ground. Tabor's claustrophobic and pulse-pounding narrative follows two of the world's premier cavers--American Bill Stone and Ukrainian Alexander Klimchouk--as they race to explore Earth's deepest caves, swimming through steering wheel-sized tunnels and scaling rock walls slick with spring runoff. Caving is dirty and dangerous work, and Tabor pulls no punches in describing the many terrifying hazards that cavers face underground, including falling rocks, hypothermia, starvation, nitrogen narcosis, hallucinations, hypoxia, and deadly anxiety attacks. He captures the eerie mixture of excitement and horror that accompanies life in extreme environments, while shedding light on the ineffable and complex moral code that governs men and women in places where survival is hoped for, but never guaranteed. Blind Descent is a captivating summer read for adventure seekers and armchair adrenaline junkies alike. --Lynette Mong
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Customer Reviews:
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 Armchair Caver's Delight!, May 18, 2010
By Lynne E. (California)
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Entertaining account of the expeditions of two world-renowned cavers (Bill Stone, Alexander Klimchouk) that explored deep supercaves in Mexico (Cheve, Huautla) and the Republic of Georgia (Krubera). Serious cavers will likely be familiar with many of the discoveries recounted, but armchair cavers will enjoy learning about the tremendous obstacles, common to supercaves, that must be traversed in deep cave exploration (e.g., vertical shafts of up to 500 feet, crashing waterfalls, boulders, seemingly impassable sumps, extremely tight meanders).
The book goes into detail about caving techniques, the special dangers of cave diving, and the development of the rebreathers that make extended exploration by cave divers possible. There are vivid descriptions of actions that proved fatal, or nearly fatal, to some cavers. There is also much interesting biographical information about both Stone and Klimchouk. The well-written, page-turning narrative is presented in a way that makes caving accessible to non-cavers.
The advance review copy that I received had no photographs, which was a disappointment. However, the author's skill at describing underground scenes makes up considerably for the lack of photographs. If the hardcover book should include photographs, then this book should receive 5 stars. (Rating changed to 5 stars on 6/2/10. See comments to this review.)
62 of 67 people found the above review helpful.
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 Blind Descent, May 5, 2010
By Stephen Balbach (Ashton, MD United States)
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`Blind Descent` is about elite explorers who seek out the ultimate prize: the worlds deepest caves. These so-called "super caves" require days or even weeks underground in large supported missions like climbing Mt. Everest, yet most people know very little about this highly specialized field of exploration. It is one of the few exciting books for a general audience about extreme caving.
Tabor's book is "adrenalin literature", it keeps one flipping pages and the heart racing, the kind of creative nonfiction pioneered with Into Thin Air and The Perfect Storm. But it feels less mature and gimmicky, at 250 pages there are 49 chapters, stopping unnecessarily in the middle of a scene, I suppose to build tension and create cliff-hangers. In effect it causes so much white space between chapters at times I was turning pages faster than a falling rock. There is an unnecessary amount of antagonism created around Bill Stone's personality, the freedom of creative non-fiction for the sake of entertainment went a little too far by inflating Bill's personality against a Russian caver. We have a "race" (which it really isn't) against two antagonists (who really are not). No doubt these techniques will sell books, but I wished for something of more substance and less artificial drama.
Tabor admits that he owes a large debt to Bill Stone's book Beyond the Deep: The Deadly Descent Into the World's Most Treacherous Cave, which is about one of Stone's epic cave explorations in Mexico. Indeed the most gripping part of `Blind Descent` is when it recounts scenes from `Beyond the Deep`. Although it doesn't have the journalistic perspective of `Blind Descent`, Stone's book is a true first person primary source, sort of like the difference between those who go to war, and those who stay home and romanticize about it. `Blind Descent` is an easy and quick journalistic introduction to caving and I'm glad to have read it but look forward to reading `Beyond the Deep` and wish I had earlier.
42 of 49 people found the above review helpful.
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Wow, May 19, 2010
By Avid Reader (Minneapolis)
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Caves and caving fascinate me, so when I saw there was a book about supercave exploration, I had to read it. I am so glad I did. I was absolutely glued to this book from the first page to the last. The only thing it lacked was a section of pictures, but that's the price I pay for reading an advance copy--the published edition has several pages of them. Even so, I was able to look those up on the internet so I could have a visual reference, which made the book even more powerful.
This is not so much the story of cave exploration as it is about cave explorers. Tabor researched two premier cavers from the USA and the Republic of Georgia, and devoted a section of the book to each. American Bill Stone has led several expeditions into supercaves in Mexico, while Ukranian Alexander Klimchouk has headed several European expeditions on the Arabika Massif in the Republic of Georgia.
In addition to following the amazing accomplishments of both men, Tabor explained in great detail the hardships and dangers involved in supercave exploration. I felt like I was there on the expeditions; rappelling, digging, crawling, diving, and freezing underground for days or weeks on end along with the cavers mentioned in this book. I have nothing but respect for this handful of people who risk their lives for the thrill of going thousands of feet underground and braving the dangers there in order to share their discoveries with the world. There's pretty much no chance at all of me dropping down the first shaft of Cheve Cave, and forget it with Krubera, so I really appreciate this insider view.
I cannot recommend this book enough. It's highly informative, giving outsiders an intimate view of what goes into supercave exploration, and it's also an exciting page-turner. Tabor has a way of keeping readers on the edge of their seats as he takes us through real-life underground exploration. I found myself thinking of several fascinating topics I wish he would write about because he has a way of making an informative, nonfiction book into an exciting adventure, and not many authors can pull that off.
35 of 37 people found the above review helpful.
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Awesome Caving Book - Get Ready For An Adventure!, May 1, 2010
By Book Reviews Weekly
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I wasn't sure when I first picked up Blind Descent that I would like it. I mean honestly, how good can a book about caving be when you can't actually see the cave itself? After two days of forcing myself to put this book down, I can honestly say it's the best book about caves I have ever read. The author does an amazing job of describing the caves and explorers. It's no too much detail that you get tired of reading...but it's enough to let you picture it in your mind. The book follows two different main characters, and reading about them and their exploits is like watching a dangerous stunt knowing that something could go wrong. As Blind Descent shows, when you're thousands of feet down in a cave, something going wrong usually means death or a close call for a caver. I think the book is very respectable to cavers, and after reading it, I am glad that more people will understand the risk they take to explorer Earth's last frontier so to speak.
Blind Descent has been a great "armchair adventure" to me, and if you like caves, exploring, or adventure type books, you will not be disappointed with this book! It's something I read in two days because I just couldn't put it down...you'll enjoy the journey.
Update: Mr. Tabor has informed me that the book will have a number of pictures!
27 of 31 people found the above review helpful.
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 Krakauer 'lite', November 10, 2010
By Viking (Los Angeles USA)
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James Tabor's Blind Decent gives the reader a good idea of what 'Supercaving' involves, and it's an exciting topic.
One that interested me enough to buy the hardcover, without previous recommendations.
Unfortunately, it doesn't come close either in depth or entertainment-value to the quality of books like Krakauer's 'Into Thin Air', a comparison that the author is probably sick of, but given the genre is a fair one.
I don't mean to be too critical; the book had some good information, and showcased some interesting, odd-ball characters.
Tabor is obviously interested in the subject matter, and does put an effort into conveying to the reader what makes 'supercaving' such a fascinating, and dangerous, obsession.
That said, I think if he had expanded the scope of the novel, and done some more research, Blind Descent could have been a classic.
As it is, it comes off more like a magazine article that got a bit too forcefully expanded into a novel.
It's sort of a drawn-out mess, written in an annoying cliff-hanger style with too many chapters, too much hyped-up language, and with the content shoe-horned into a contrived structure (a 'race' between two cavers) that might have seemed clever but wasn't.
Tabor is capable of decent writing, but Blind Descent at times suffers from a 'Reality Show' sensibility. But maybe that's the audience he was going for.....
The first ca. 2/3 of the book are about Bill Stone, an American caver, and this is where a good editor should have stepped in. Yes, Bill Stone is an interesting guy; we are treated to chapter after chapter dealing with occasionally pertinent topics (rebreathers, previous expeditions), but also way too much information about his marriage, his hot girlfriend, his height, his next hot girlfriend, his alpha-maleness, what other people said about his hot girlfriend, his height again, and on and on.
I kept reading, hoping in vain for maybe more historical background on caving in general, or details on the exploration of the deep caves in France and Austria that Tabor frustratingly mentions several times in passing. These western European 'supercaves' just seemed like a painfully obvious tangent to explore, and I think most readers, whether within the caving community or the general public, would have found them far more interesting than another chapter about Bill Stone's love life.
Seriously: Reading how, deep in a cave, Bills Stone's 'ardor' had returned, allowing him and his girlfriend to have 'postprandial' sex was cringe-inducing.
That Tabor relied far too heavily on Bill Stone for the story becomes increasingly obvious when we (finally!) get to the much shorter section dealing with Alexander Klimchouk, the Ukrainian, who seems both like a much classier guy AND a better expedition leader.
Refreshingly, the Klimchouk section was more clearly written and concise (when not interrupted by more Bill Stone comments), and included some interesting background on his youth in the Young Pioneers organization in the Soviet Union (and thankfully nothing about his sex life). But by that point, it was too late. Blind Descent's structure had completely overpowered its content. Because, somewhat crucially given the book's set-up, there was no real competition between the two. None, other than that they are both cavers and both would like to find the longest/deepest cave. And (semi-spoiler alert) given the outcome of the 'race', I had an even harder time seeing why Bill Stone got to sit on the first 2/3 of the book. Why is he the main emphasis of Blind Descent? Because he's an American? Because he already wrote an easy-to-quote book himself ? Because he dates hot young women? In Blind Descent's utterly artificial compare-and-contrast scenario, Klimchouk, with maybe 1/4 of the page-count, wins with one hand behind his back. Bill Stone should have been the secondary character, if his presence was essential to the narrative at all.
Also, Tabor's writing contains too many quick-and-easy cliches and some patches of repetition and plain sloppiness that stop the flow..
For example, this one pops up early in the narrative: "....crew escapes from sunken subs were tragic but few...."
No; a crew NOT escaping from a sunken sub is tragic. Come on....
I know mistakes happen, but to me, stuff like this is a literary 'fly in the soup'. It sort of affects the whole experience.
And, as others have mentioned, the writing occasionally verges on "It's like Die Hard - In a Cave!" exaggeration,
and made me think Tabor didn't trust the readers, or his skills as a writer, with the material without hyping it.
Some examples, and he repeats these:
- He compares 'supercave' exploring to climbing an upside down mount Everest. I get the dramatic point, but saying it once for effect is enough.
- He talks about the quest to find the "bottom of the world". Technically, the cavers don't even get to the bottom of the inside of a mid-size mountain. So....not even sea level?
- He calls supercaving the "Last terrestrial challenge". For an adventure writer, that is a disappointingly unimaginative statement.
....And given erosion, earthquakes, ground penetrating radar etc it is more than likely that the 'world's deepest cave' is a highly temporary title.
Again, I can see this style working in a magazine article; in a novel-length book it starts to sound huckster-ish after a while.
In summary, a middling-entertaining book, but not one I plan on saving to re-read in the future.
12 of 15 people found the above review helpful.
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That guy should be on drugs., June 22, 2010
By William Mixon (Austin, Texas, USA)
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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
12 of 22 people found the above review helpful.
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Like I Was There ... Without All the Physical Strain, May 20, 2010
By paisleymonsoon (Tulsa, Oklahoma)
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I've grown to really love adventure and survival books and thought this would definitely be an interesting read in the genre. I wasn't disappointed. Blind Descent tells of cave exploration adventures in 2 of the world's deepest caves. I was initially concerned that the author wouldn't be able to make me see the cave in my mind as he told the story and that the author couldn't possibly hold my interest throughout the entire book, but I was absolutely enthralled and found myself daydreaming of cave diving between reads.
When I first thought what I might encounter in this book, I wondered what fun there could be in dropping into a deep hole that went down thousands of feet, but these caves aren't simply deep holes. The process includes rappelling down some very large shafts as well as walking some straight stretches before hitting another shaft or waterfall. Sometimes they have to send divers to swim through water they call "sumps" in order to find another opening into the cave beyond. Other times they find themselves trying to squeeze through very tight openings between rocks or even digging to make room for their bodies to fit though tinier openings carved by water over time. The experience is physically demanding and sometimes even deadly. And the exploration can last, sometimes, decades.
This particular caving book chronicles (as much as possible) deep cave discoveries in the Cheve Cave of Mexico and the Krubera cave in The Republic of Georgia. The caves are very different and so are the leaders of the expeditions. The Mexican cave is climatically normal and fairly open while the Georgian one is very cold and filled with very tight, slippery spaces. The leader of the Cheve Cave expeditions (an American) is hot-headed and lusty while the leader of the Krubera expeditions (a Ukranian) is level-headed and systematic.
There's far more information in the book about the Cheve Cave expeditions than the Krubera expeditions. I think this partially is because of language barriers for interview and partially because there probably was much more of a story to tell about the Cheve cave expeditions. In fact, I was glad the Krubera section of the book was fairly short because I wanted to get back to reading about the Cheve Cave.
I wish the book would have had pictures. I'm sure the book would have been more expensive to publish with pictures. However, a quick search online yields many pictures from various sources, including some really nice pictures of Cheve Cave on Flickr.
I highly recommend this book to anyone who loves adventure or survival stories or caving.
11 of 13 people found the above review helpful.
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Steep and thrilling descent with a few grueling passages towards the end, May 10, 2010
By A. Reid (NC, USA)
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I'd have to say my reading of this book must have paralleled in some ways the cave exploration experience itself--at least, for inexperienced explorers. Never having read anything about cave exploration, I was intensely excited to read this and learn more about it. For the most part, the first half of the book kept me going eagerly. Tabor managed to convey a lot of information but still kept a brisk pace that made the reading effortless. And there were a lot of "wow" moments: eye-popping passages that had me grabbing whichever family member was in ear shot with a "Listen to this...." While some of these were not as impressive to my audience as they were to me, I still got plenty of water-cooler conversation out of it (metaphorically speaking).
However, as at least one prior reviewer here did, I found my enthusiasm somewhat taxed by Part II, by which point a lot of the work was familiar. I didn't stop enjoying the book by any means, but my momentum lagged and what had been a page-turned became a more casual affair. I did not find the race between Stone and Klimchouk quite as compelling as the author seems to have. In fact, I suspect it slowed me down. But while I would have been at least as happy to read a single in-depth report of the work of either team, perhaps those more familiar with cave exploration will appreciate the complication to keep their energies unflagging.
Even though it started for me stronger than it finished, I still have to say that the book is well worth the read. I was engaged and educated...and that's quite enough to put it on my "recommend" list.
11 of 13 people found the above review helpful.
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Now this book is a DEEP subject, May 26, 2010
By artist and musician (Pennsylvania, United States)
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BLIND DESCENT is the kind of book you read, if your favorite channel is NATGEO, and your favorite film is INTO THIN AIR, and you have a strong taste for adventure and Human Exploration. The book recounts two different explorers, Bill Stone and Alex Klimchouk, going after the same prise, the discovery of the deepest cave in the world. The two different cave explorations occured over a period of several years, with Bill Stone (funded by NatGeo, among other companies) looking for the deepest cave in Mexico, at Cheve, and Klimchouk looking in the southern USSR (ie Georgia), in the Arabika Massif. (Krubera is the name of the deepest cave.) This book tells a story about how these two men, totally obsessively driven, lead nearly parallel lives as they sacrificed their family relationships, and in the case of Bill Stone, much more, looking for fame and glory. Unless you've seen the National Geographic TV Specials about the exploration and discovery of the deepest cave in the world, or read the book BEYOND THE DEEP, or read National Geographic magazine, then the ending of the book will be unknown to you. BLIND DESCENT mostly recounting the numerous expeditions of Bill Stone into the CHEVE megacave system, as he bets his life on finding the world's deepest cave. However, like other explorers who go the limit, either to be the first to reach the South Pole, North Pole, or scale Mt Everest, or for that matter, even the first astronauts, these explorations dare death, while using the newest technologies, just to be in the record books.
Anyone who loves adventure, scientific discovery, and TENSION (aka suspence), then this is a book for you. These spelunkers arent just NO FEAR teenagers out for a thrill. These men who head these explorations in the deepest caves, have at least PhDs, multiple talents, incredible athletic abilities, courage, and a bit of insanity. I'd like to go into detail about the adventures, and the tragidies of this book, but why spoil it? I will say this, that I actually stopped reading it a couple of times, cos BLIND DESCENT's discription of the events in the caves was very intense, and I have clastophobia. Other fears you get to face are poisonous snakes, cave spiders, total darkness, and drowning in water sinkholes and meanders more narrow than your laptop computer screen. My only problem with this book, was a lack of photographs, cave maps, etc, that would have definately helped to visualize what was being explained by the author. Its one thing to call a cave a fairy land, or an ugly brown mess with a foot of bat guana on the floor, or to discribe this deep holes they had to rappel to the bottom, but its much better to see a photo. So, for any of you who'd like to have a good idea what to expect here, go to your favorite internet search engine, type in either ARABIKA MASSIF or KRUBIKA for the deepest cave in the former USSR republic of Georgia, or type in CHEVE cave system in Mexico. You'll see the links sponsered by NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC, and link onto them. You'll see cave maps, tons of photos, and a brief discription of the various attempts by both men to be the first to stand on the bottom of the world. If you enjoy what you see, and think a whole book about cave exploration might be for you, DEFINATELY buy this book. If you visited caves before, or if you are a spelunker, or Geologist perhaps, you'll enjoy the book even more. But this book is definately for those people who love true life adventure stories, and the biographies of the men who sacrifice their lives, to be the FIRST. From the days of Christopher Columbus, to Neil Armstrong, some guys have the right stuff to make these sacrifices. With complete candor, the lives of these two men, STONE and KLIMCHOUK, are revealed warts and all. Actualy, the book is less about EXPLORATION, and more about EXPLORERS. The book explores extremes in Human nature, that push certain driven individuals forward into the unknown. It's a good summer read, and you'll walk away learning something new about caves and the people who love them.
11 of 14 people found the above review helpful.
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High Adventure, May 18, 2010
By Susan McIntyre (Iowa)
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I consulted my husband's expertise on this book, since he has been a recreational caver for 40 years. He has explored caves all over the United States and reads scientific and recreational caving journals and speleology texts.
Blind Descent is a well researched modern high adventure story. The story is very readable and face paced. The reader is struggling along with the adventurers, turning the pages quickly to see what happens next.
The book compares two adventurers on their race to one of the last frontiers on earth. American caver Bill Stone who is striving to reach the end of Cheve Cave in Mexico is a risk taking egomaniac, with low morals. I would not like to explore with him. His "cowboy" methods are not representative of typical American recreational or Scientific cavers.
Alexander Kimchouk is a Ukrainian explorer seeking answers in Krubera Cave, Republic of Georgia. His approach is the European method. He plans carefully and methodically. His story speaks well of European cavers.
I enjoyed reading this book and would read another book by this author.
11 of 14 people found the above review helpful.
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A Dark Dangerous Quest into the Earth's Bowels (4.5 Stars), May 13, 2010
By Busy Mom
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I liked Ed Viesturs' K2: Life and Death on the World's Most Dangerous Mountain and Krakauer's Into Thin Air: A Personal Account of the Mt. Everest Disaster, so I suppose it's not particularly surprising that I was drawn to this book about exploration in the opposite direction.
What I found interesting about mountain climbing journeys was the group dynamics and environmental struggles that the explorers faced. And I'm happy to say that this was very much what Tabor wrote about. With page-turning prose, he really brought home how dangerous the Super Caves were. As he points out, difficulties include, but were not limited to, drowning, fatal falls (of course), premature burial, earthquake collapses, poison gases, bats, snakes, scorpions, radon, deadly microbes and toxic chemical slurries (like sulfuric acid which can drip from the cave walls).
As well, he showed how different leadership styles spilled over to effect the group and it's results. To do this Tabor focused on two radically different individuals. One was the Type-A American engineer, Bill Stone; while the other (Stone's psychic opposite) was the team-building scientist Klimchouk of the Ukraine. I thought it was really interesting to see both the strengths and weaknesses of each approach.
If you read this book I can't see how you can come away without understanding what cave exploration is like. And it's equally likely that you'll have drawn your opinion as to which man you would prefer to climb with.
TALKING POINTS:::
Overall "Blind Descent" was a good and interesting read. Tabor kept me flipping the pages, curious as to what would come next. His characterizations were solid if not stellar.
The parts involving Bill Stone's studies and adventures were particularly well researched. Those involving Klimchouk were sketchier based, one surmises, on difficulties arising from logistics and linguistics.
Addendum: It was initially my understanding that there weren't any pictures in this book. It was a faulty assumption that I made because there weren't any placeholders. I've been informed though by Random House that there will be "three dozen 4C images from three expeditions".
Pam T
(PageInHistory)
10 of 11 people found the above review helpful.
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Incredible places where few will set foot, May 8, 2010
By Personne (Rocky Mountain West)
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To most of us with some small knowledge of history, the names of Scott and Amundsen, Hillary and Norgay, or Armstrong and Aldrin resonate strongly. I could easily add a hundred more names to that list. But I couldn't have named a single caver before encountering this book. The field of speleology--cave exploration--is small and clannish, but no less consumed with glory than the explorers I've mentioned. The obsession described in James Tabor's book is the desire to find the deepest cave in the world.
Tabor has chosen two protagonists, as different as they can be. The first, American Bill Stone, is brilliant and abrasive. He is appreciated for his skills and determination; still there are many cavers who will not explore with him. His driven approach results in the invention of a rebreather which allows explorers to remain underwater for hours at a time. The same approach costs him family and friends. Some colleagues claim it has also cost lives. His focus is a series of caves in Mexico.
The second major figure is Ukranian Alexander Klimchouk, a polar opposite. His team-driven approach is less motivated by personal glory than curiosity about what lies beyond another passageway. He is widely respected and is given credit for the growth of speleology in Eastern Europe. His caves lie in Abkhasia, along the Black Sea.
But most of all this book is about what it is like to be more than 1000 meters underground, miles and days from an entrance. It is a world that is cold, wet and above all, dark. To lose a lamp is to lose one's life. These 'supercaves' are not the caverns we visit on vacation, with walkways, bridges and permanent lights. These caves have pits that drop 500 feet and require mountaineering skills. These caves have lakes with narrow passages that require specialized diving skills. Explorers die by falling. They die by drowning. Rocks constantly fall around them and bodies grow numb from hypothermia. These conditions are easily as trying as mountain-climbing or space exploration.
I come away with a healthy respect for the people in this occupation. I enjoy the descriptions of lakes and giant chambers far underground. I will never in a million years set foot in places like these. But in Tabor's marvelously entertaining book, I can get a taste of it.
10 of 11 people found the above review helpful.
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Gripping, May 8, 2010
By J. Peterson (Minnesota)
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I enjoyed this book, although I simply cannot imagine why anyone would ever do this type of activity. The beauty of reading this book is that it is a bit like going to a movie, where you can thrill to the fantastic adventure of others without having to endure the risk and discomfort (and in this case, claustrophobia) yourself.
If you enjoy reading about exploration and adventure, this will be a good read, although I agree with another reviewer who felt that the book lost its head of steam later on.
This is essentially the story of 2 different cave fanatics, one American and the other Ukrainian, who are each driven to see if they can find the deepest cave on Earth. First you read most of the American's story and then most of the Ukrainian's quest, with the last part of the book portrayed as a race to the finish line (who knew that cave exploration was a competitive event?).
Theirs is a very special quest. "Deepest" cave apparently means the cave with the greatest vertical drop from entrance to its lowest point, with horizontal distance (in which Mammoth Cave is ranked biggest) being irrelevant. Lest you think this is a Journey to the Center of the Earth, it's actually not, because all of these caves start at high elevation and thus really don't penetrate deep into the planet. And laying claim to being the "deepest" is not a permanent or provable claim; a better term would be "deepest yet discovered and penetrated by humans," to be technically correct. Thus unlike being the first to climb the highest mountain on earth, which can only happen once and then never again, the quest for the deepest cave can go on forever, so long as there are people with enough drive to do it.
It's a cliche to say it, but this book was one of those that was hard to put down once I had started reading it. My only quibble is that it contains no maps, pictures or illustrations whatsover. My enjoyment would have increased (to 5 stars) if there had only been a diagram of each cave, illustrations of some of the caving gear that the author describes, perhaps a map showing the locations of some of the caves, and of course photos of at least the 2 main characters so you can see what the people look like who want to spend weeks at a time living underground.
10 of 12 people found the above review helpful.
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A Dark Dangerous Quest into the Earth's Bowels (4.5 Stars), May 13, 2010
By Busy Mom
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I liked Ed Viesturs' K2: Life and Death on the World's Most Dangerous Mountain and Krakauer's Into Thin Air: A Personal Account of the Mt. Everest Disaster, so I suppose it's not particularly surprising that I was drawn to this book about exploration in the opposite direction.
What I found interesting about mountain climbing journeys was the group dynamics and environmental struggles that the explorers faced. And I'm happy to say that this was very much what Tabor wrote about. With page-turning prose, he really brought home how dangerous the Super Caves were. As he points out, difficulties include, but were not limited to, drowning, fatal falls (of course), premature burial, earthquake collapses, poison gases, bats, snakes, scorpions, radon, deadly microbes and toxic chemical slurries (like sulfuric acid which can drip from the cave walls).
As well, he showed how different leadership styles spilled over to effect the group and it's results. To do this Tabor focused on two radically different individuals. One was the Type-A American engineer, Bill Stone; while the other (Stone's psychic opposite) was the team-building scientist Klimchouk of the Ukraine. I thought it was really interesting to see both the strengths and weaknesses of each approach.
If you read this book I can't see how you can come away without understanding what cave exploration is like. And it's equally likely that you'll have drawn your opinion as to which man you would prefer to climb with.
TALKING POINTS:::
Overall "Blind Descent" was a good and interesting read. Tabor kept me flipping the pages, curious as to what would come next. His characterizations were solid if not stellar.
The parts involving Bill Stone's studies and adventures were particularly well researched. Those involving Klimchouk were sketchier based, one surmises, on difficulties arising from logistics and linguistics.
Addendum: It was initially my understanding that there weren't any pictures in this book. It was a faulty assumption that I made because there weren't any placeholders. I've been informed though by Random House that there will be "three dozen 4C images from three expeditions".
Pam T
(PageInHistory)
10 of 11 people found the above review helpful.
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Like reading a high school history book, October 25, 2010
By Mainly Moderate (Boston, MA)
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I loved such adventure books as Into Thin Air and the Perfect Storm, so I was really excited about Into the Deep. Unfortunately, this book lost sight of the human story as it exhaustively regurgitated facts. Although the book focuses primarily on two cavers, so many other cavers are mentioned that it is difficult to remember (or care) who is who. I wish the author had spent more time on the emotional aftermath--and how it was overcome--of the cave accidents, several of which were fatal, and less time on the fact that Bill Stone had multiple relationships with younger female cavers. There are brief glimpses into the "real world" of cavers--Ukranians forgoing sexual relations in caves out of respect for one another while Americans rattled the plastic liners under their own sleeping bags in sync to the rattling liner under a couple egaged in intimacies, or the Ukranian caver feeling betrayed by a son who goes to cave with the Russians--but these moments are far and few between. If you're looking for an extended Wikipedia article, this book is a good bet. If you're looking for a book that leaves you feeling like you've had a real taste of the main characters' adventures, give this one a pass.
7 of 8 people found the above review helpful.
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An insane real life horror adventure. I couldnt't stop reading., April 26, 2010
By oldtaku (San Diego, CA United States)
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'Blind Descent' is about two groups of cavers attempting to establish that 'their' caves are the deepest on Earth. The compelling part for me was really just how insane these people are. You're literally a mile underground, in absolute darkness, covered in water and mud (because these caves are carved by water). You run into a 'room' packed unstably with loose rocks which have fallen from above, blocking your progress. What do you do? The answer, apparently, is to find a likely crevice and slowly worm your way into it, carefully pushing rocks this way and that to make a crawlhole and hoping the whole thing doesn't fall on you. Or if your way has been blocked by a sump (a water pool) - the obvious next step is to dive in and notice a jagged hole smaller than your car steering wheel and dive through it, right?
Welcome to the world of supercaving - spending weeks underground in utter darkness, constantly wet, hammering rope points into the sheer wall of a 500 foot drop while a waterfall thunders down on your head. Or jammed head down in a pit so tight you can only move your forward arm and scrape at the dirt, trying to tunnel through. I'm not afraid of heights, but I am mildly claustrophobic, so for me this book was a bit of a Friday the 13th experience. But fascinating - I couldn't stop reading and finished the whole thing in one afternoon.
'Blind Descent' is a bit breathlessly written, but I think the subject matter allows it. These are not normal people - they're obsessed supermen (and women) exploring the nastiest and most hostile places on Earth. Also, I got something of a 'feel' for the Cheve cave system in Mexico (Stone expeditions) from the first part of the book, while the Krubera cave in the Republic of Georgia (Klimchouk expeditions) in the second and third parts of the book never got too fleshed out. But as the book points out, Cheve is a spectacular cave system and Krubera is just a nasty, tight little series of tubes that is special only in how deep they go, so maybe there's just not much to say. The French cave system they're both trying to wrest the depth crown from never shows up at all, just serving as a MacGuffin.
So since I prefer my crazy risks in open air, this is something I'll never do - but it's certainly a fun place to play book tourist for a while, and this book delivered.
7 of 8 people found the above review helpful.
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Way too much Bill Stone, September 25, 2010
By Xiaoti
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Sadly, I abandoned this read halfway through. The non-stop, over the top gushing about Bill Stone was obnoxious to the point of extreme distraction from what would otherwise be a fascinating topic and story. Stone is compared to everyone from Christ to Columbus over and over and over again. A misunderstood genius more daring than a Navy Seal and smarter than Einstein. How many times was he referred to as a Type A personality? I am not a caver and had never heard of Bill Stone before. I certainly know more than I ever wanted to now! A shame since the part about caving was very interesting.
7 of 9 people found the above review helpful.
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A Tight Kiss Of Depth, April 30, 2010
By Scaramouche (Las Vegas NV USA)
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When he finally popped out the other side, there was a wierd similarity to birth about the whole thing: the painful passage through a constricted canal, followed by shocking emergence from water to air into a cold room where waited an oddly dressed man with lights on his head.
Welcome to the "twilight zone", that part of the cave where external light still penetrated. In Blind Descent your going dark, where there is no light. Your going to have to concern yourself with a possible "breakdown", jagged boulders that have broken from the ceiling over eons and continue to do so unpredicably. You won't be able to see the coming "pitches", what cavers call verticle drops, including that 500-foot monster! But you'll pick up the lingo soon and be able to tell your friend about your "dropping", a rite of passage, rappelling to the bottom. Of course, you'll be "frogging", ascending up the rope. When someone screams, "ROCK!", the standard warning for any falling object, your just going to prey that you'll soon be "hot bagging", sharing a sleeping bag.
A great read for a number of reasons. This is a world few know and the author does a wonderous job of bringing you into it.
A deadly environment of which a few possible outcomes are: drowning, fatal falls, premature burial, earthquake-induced collapses, poison gases. Or possible encounters include: rabid bats, snakes, troglodytic scorpions, siders, radon, and nasty microbes that cause horrific diseases. Or how about some supercave inner dangers as well: warping the mind with claustrophobia, anxiety, insomnia, hallcinations, personality disorders?
Then there is the easy one: getting lost in absolute total darkness without a single photon of light to keep you company. Not only does this darkness have profound effects on your mind but on the human body as well. It disrupts the normal 24-hour body rythems, weakens the immune system, and induces auditory and visual hullicinations. But as water is to diving, or air to flying, it is caving's medium - darkness. It shapes the caver's world more than any other aspect of the environment. To a caver it has weight and presence, life, a character all its own.
There is the story revolves around two main characters that carry the narrative in their quest for the bottom of the world. One is Alexander Kilmchouk and the other is Bill Stone. They are diametrically opposite. The author follows them in their lives as the caving takes them and the reader on their fated rendevous toward the bottom of the world.
There is a little of everything in the story including a little sex. Not unheard of, literally not unheard!/In the same vein, plastic groundsheets did a good job of protecting sleeping bags from abrasion, but their drawbacks when it came to romancing on stone. The distinctive crinkle-crinkle sound they made., impossible to ignore...Before long, the entire campsite might be crinkling as though invaded by a flock of crickets...participants did try to perserve some decorum by keeping the moaning and screaming down.
And down is where its at in caving.
Down & Empty.
HIGHLY RECOMMENDED !!!!!!!
7 of 9 people found the above review helpful.
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Interesting real life adventure--even for a non-caver!, June 10, 2010
By P. Eisenman (Upper Michigan)
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I enjoyed BLIND DESCENT. Even though I've never been spelunking and have no intention of taking it up, I still enjoyed this book. You don't have to be a mountain climber to enjoy stories about the climbing of Mount Everest and you don't have to rappel and crawl 6000+ feet down a hole to find multiple rousing adventures inside this book.
The only trouble I had was actually imagining the total darkness one would find a mile or more deep under ground. There was always that "ambient light" in my imagination as I read along even though author James M. Tabor adequetely drove home the point that the darkness is absolute and without a light, you're dead--literally.
The descriptions of the conditions the explorers experienced is always described in detail (but not in a boring way!). It's just very hard to grasp the concept of how cold, wet, dark and dangerous deep cave exploration can be.
This book also explores the personalities behind the deep descents and the drive to discover new territory. Should safety come first? Or, like other voyagers into the uncharted territory, are a few deaths along the way simply part of the price for treading into the unknown? Is it "cold" and unfeeling to perservere after an accident or is the only thing that gives meaning to the death? While author Tabor presents no conclusion himself, he provides the reader with the means to ponder the idea and draw your own conclusions.
Personally, I can only say that if people 500 years ago had had to deal with all the regulatory safety agencies and government bureaucracy that there is now, I'd be willing to bet that we wouldn't even be sure today that the earth is round and Europe and the Americas would be mutually unknown! Although I'm sure there are some who'd say that would be a GOOD thing!
Ditto for going to the moon. If NASA had spent all their time investigating every accident, we'd be lucky if any astronaut even got off the ground. Life is risk and sometimes the outcome isn't a happy one. Maybe that's why I liked this book, because these people are the risk takers and I could live vicariously through their efforts as described by author Tabor.
Well written, quick moving and exciting. Think Jules Verne, but factual. No "middle earth" world, but no less amazing!
I give FOUR STARS to BLIND DESCENT by James M. Tabor. If you like real life adventure and exploration, you'll like this book!
6 of 7 people found the above review helpful.
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Interesting window into another world, May 14, 2010
By Brian A. Schar (Menlo Park, CA United States)
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"Blind Descent" is a window into another world - two worlds, really: the one beneath our feet, and the one inhabited by the "Tribe," extreme spelunkers who love supercaves. The first 3/4 of the book follows an American team in Mexico, and the second 1/4 follows a Ukrainian team in Georgia. The differences between the teams, the caves and their approaches to spelunking are fascinating. (As one might imagine, the Americans try not to disturb things, and the Ukrainians do not hesitate to use explosives.) The author really captures the excitement, extreme discomfort, and terror of being at the front of a massive multi-week expedition below the earth. I didn't know anything about this subject, and found "Blind Descent" to be an interesting tale of people who thrive on challenges that I can't even imagine. On the downside, the ending just kind of peters out. And, as other reviewers have pointed out, a drawing or two to illustrate the supercaves described in the book would have been nice, but certainly not essential.
"Blind Descent" is at least worth checking out at the library. It's also an ideal length for cross-country airplane reading.
6 of 7 people found the above review helpful.
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Excellent, entertaining saga, April 27, 2010
By J. S. Green
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I ordered this book because I am fascinated by adventures like mountaineering, and I thought this would be interesting. I am not disappointed - this is a very good read.
The story chronicles the efforts of two cavers over the past three decades as they attempt to find the deepest cave in the world. The majority of the story revolves around Bill Stone and his attempts to explore two caves in Mexico. He is an amazing character, someone almost bigger than life, right out of a Greek legend. And like the Greek hero, he has his failings and his strengths. I was amazed by his determination to perfect a rebreather (which is used like scuba gear, except it lasts for many hours), and his inventiveness. The author doesn't mince words, but presents both sides of the man. I got a real feel for the energy that Mr. Stone brings to his endeavours.
The rest of the story involves Alexander Klimchouk, a Ukrainian who is the exact opposite of Mr. Stone - a determined scientist who views caving as a long term accomplishment. He was involved in a different deep cave, in the Republic of Georgia. Reading his story was interesting because of the contrasting ways that were used. Mr. Klimchouk mounted a sort of campaign, and his explorations reminded me of British expeditions to Africa.
Both men were racing to find the deepest cave, and one won. I won't spoil the book by telling which one.
As to the book itself, this is very easy reading. The writing style is free-flowing, packing in a lot of information without being dense. The book starts with Bill Stone and his history with Mexican caves, then tells of Dr. Klimchouk and his history with deep caves, and finally tells the culminating stories of their attempts to get to the bottom (literally) of things. I like this much better than switching back and forth in a time line, which other books have done. One never lost the grasp of the immediate tale with this writing style.
The only drawback to this book is that I was left desiring a bit MORE of the details. There were a lot of facts, but somehow I felt that more could have been said. In some ways the book seemed simple. Perhaps it is because the author did not go into a lot of detail outside the main story, or maybe that is just good writing - passing on a lot of information without making the reader KNOW he or she is being informed. I did find it interesting that whenever the author was describing a specific caving action (like rigging ropes), he used the pronoun "she" - never "he". Cavers are of both sexes, and it isn't a bit deal, but it stood out.
Caving is dangerous, and this book is not suitable for children below the age of 12. I recommend this book for anyone interested in adventure and the human struggle to explore. Nice read!
6 of 7 people found the above review helpful.
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Overly dramatic author but interesting history, September 28, 2010
By dubs
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This is an interesting read but Tabor lacks the skill to impart the harrowing nature of caving. Instead Tabor mercilessly beats the danger it into you but stating the same thing over and over again. By the end I was annoyed with his "danger" prose.
The book also tries to relate super-caving to climbing the tallest peaks, the moon missions, Antarctica but it doesn't really hold water with this reader. First off, these guys are starting on the tops of mountains and heading down. So the whole concept of the deepest place on earth is a bit misleading.
Tabor is clearly a sensationalist and was worried that his story telling wouldn't keep us engaged so he constantly oversells us one point after another. Like constantly refering to Bill Stone as some super strong imposing figure. He is tall at 6'4" but only weighs 200 pounds. That is not all that imposing, I'm sorry.
My other beef with this book is it is 80% Bill Stone and 20% Alexander Klimchouk. Klimchouk found the deepest cave (Krubera) and ran the best outfits, yet only the tail end of the book is dedicated to Krubera and Klimchouk.
What is interesting are the technical details of what it takes to explore super-caves, the teams, gear, time etc. I would have loved more history on caving from around the world.
6 of 8 people found the above review helpful.
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Interesting story which could use better writing, July 28, 2010
By deadsox (Foxboro,MA USA)
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Blind Descent is a book about a fascinating project to probe the depths of the earth. Sadly, James Tabor doesn't give the subject matter the strength and intelligence of subject that is required to make it interesting and compelling. Rather, we are left with a weak and disjointed view of a story which does not lead anywhere.
This book is really two books and both try and tell separate stories about the same quest, to find the deepest cave in the world. Sadly, both are weak and tepid. The Outside magazine article on Bill Stone was much better written and Outside remains a much better source on matters such as this. Sadly, this book fails in its attempt to become the "Into Thin Air" of caving and fails in doing so.
6 of 10 people found the above review helpful.
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A rather enthralling book on extreme cave exploration... At its most extreme!, April 21, 2010
By Michael Gmirkin (Beaverton, Oregon, USA)
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I'm about a third of the way through this book (in about one night, mind you). So far, it's quite an interesting read chronicling the exploits of extreme cave exploration, one of the last great unexplored territories. And seemingly far more dangerous than the exploration of the oceans, space, mountains, etc.
This book covers the perils and pitfalls, as well as some of the spectacular beauty, solitude and other things encountered by extreme cave explorers. There are deaths, marriages, divorces, mutinies, and more.
I'd say this book will appeal to a pretty wide audience. There's a little bit for everyone, and it just seems quite fascinating. Likely it will only get better, since I've only read about one of the two "big name" cave explorers and have yet to delve into the story of the other (which occupies the latter half of the book). Both explorers were involved in quests to discover the "deepest cave" in the world. Somewhat literally "the bottom of the world."
I'll give this one a thumbs up, for sure.
6 of 13 people found the above review helpful.
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Thrilling read, May 27, 2010
By Lostplanet
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This books is based on true stories but reads like a nail bitting fiction/thriller. I had a blast reading this book. Takes you to the amazing depths of mother earth.
5 of 7 people found the above review helpful.
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 Serious Shortcomings & Not An Easy Read, February 28, 2011
By World Traveler (San Francisco, CA USA)
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Including "quest" as part of the subtitle seemed to imply that this book would present a balanced, thoughtful discourse on cave exploration throughout history, or at least in the last 100 years or so.
Unfortunately, it has an extremely narrow focus and a continually strident voice. This was offputting and it became a very tiring read.
Distilled down, it's a tale of 2 individuals. Choppy and disjointed, it is basically two long magazine articles. Ultimately, there is no compelling evidence that the deepest cave on earth has been located. My two cents: the deepest cave is still out there.
The book does provide small glimpses of the incredible trials and tribulations endured by "cavers" (who garner none of the glory accorded mountain climbers - another fact we are obsessively informed about over and over). The downsides of caving are a mere 10% of the words (and that 10% gets repeated over and over). Tabor is one obsessed and rambling author. In fact, he is so obsessed that he even spends several paragraphs exploring the meaning of obsession (what? we took a left turn to philosophy 101??? when we came out of that last sump???). Unfortunately, 90% of the book is devoted to personalities. And it isn't hard to guess which person the author likes best. That sledge hammer never lets up. It becomes very annoying and detracts from whatever few upsides the book actually has.
Finally, in reading the author's cites/footnotes, one confirms that he is the worst kind of hypocrite. Divorced twice himself, he needs to get a grip and stop being jealous of older males who attract much younger females. Tabor never met a quote he didn't like (and they all appear in this book) except he has apparently never heard that "power is the ultimate aphrodisiac". Beyond the older male/younger female obsession, there are two other very, very annoying things about this book: (1) he doesn't name the two cavers who couldn't be truthful about "scooped booty" (caver lingo for seeing caves that no person has seen before) and (2) he claims he didn't interview an ex-wife out of consideration for her likely continuing pain over a divorce that had to have happened 20 years ago. Huh? They drifted apart, buddy, because they had different goals!!! I am sure she has completely moved on and is totally happy...just like your two ex-wives!
How does this guy get published? I want his agent.
5 of 8 people found the above review helpful.
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Not nearly as good as Cave Passages by Michael Ray Taylor, July 9, 2010
By a reader (Suffolk County, New York)
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Blind Descent is OK as cave literature, but who really needs all the "human interest" soap opera about Bill Stone and his girlfriends? I certainly was bored by all that. And the supposed tension/competition between the American and Russian quests felt totally contrived. For a truly great book on caves -- well-written, thoughtful, moving, realistic, thrilling.. all the superlatives -- read Cave Passages by Michael Ray Taylor c. 1996. Sadly, nothing written since on caving compares.
5 of 9 people found the above review helpful.
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As You Get Deeper and Deeper, The Going Gets Harder, June 27, 2010
By orphyte (Saint Charles, IL USA)
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Though having neither the physique nor the risk-tolerance to be a spelunker, I have always found caving to be an interesting topic. And, given my phobias about hypothermia and suffocation, I have always regarded cave-diving as one of the scariest things I could imagine. Accordingly, I was pretty charged up about reading Blind Descent. Even with the somewhat awkward positioning of the opening sequence (undoubtedly to provide a more compelling hook) to the chronology of the rest of the story, my enthusiasm continued well into the book. The story of Bill Stone's exploration of Mexican supercaves is solid, adventurous stuff, but even as Bill's story continued I was noticing that I was more taken with the subject/facts and less taken with the narrative style, which was workmanlike at best and occasionally unnecessarily confusing about time and place and who was who and how they related to each other. My enthusiasm cooled and my pace at turning pages began to slow by half-way through the book. Things turned even more frigid in the Ukraine/Georgia, with intermittant exceptions. It's not just that Klimchouk was less of a personality than Stone, it was that the narrative description--never the strong point of the book--began to lack more and more. I also wondered why the tale focused on Klimchouk, when it seemed it could have easily have focused on Kasjan. By the time of the 2004 "race," my interest had flagged considerably. The arbitrariness of the definition of "deepest" (from highest point in a cave to the lowest point in the same cave reachable by human travel; NOT the deepest below sea level or the deepest which the cave can be shown to go by hydrological testing) was not helpful, nor was the arbitrariness of the 2004 cutoff. Has nothing happened since? Maps and diagrams would have also been helpful to a better understanding of the story. A solid four star non-fiction adventure which dropped to three-stars for its pedestrian description and lackluster finish.
Full disclosure: I received a free copy of Blind Descent for review in connection with Amazon's Vine Reviewer program.
5 of 9 people found the above review helpful.
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A fair book about modern-day explorers, June 9, 2010
By 97jedi (Southwestern Missouri)
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While the author splits the tale into three parts, first detailing the efforts of American Bill Stone, then the Ukrainian Alexander Klimchouk, and finally the resolution of their opposed efforts to find the deepest cave on Earth, the focus clearly seems to be placed upon the American. Consider the page counts: Stone's section is about 150 pages, Klimchouk's about 45 with much of it referring to Stone again. I considered that an unfair shift, but partly it is due to the particulars of Stone's life, as the reader will learn. Basically, he had a lot more drama in his life, but that still should not see Klimchouk's section constantly referring to Stone in contrast, while Stone's section only referred to himself.
The overall writing is somewhat poor, with some sentences being essentially duplicated in the same paragraphs, and the same thoughts appearing multiple times on the same page more than once. The grammar and punctuation were also lacking in a good proofreading. These detracted from the reading experience. Also, the narration is non-linear, moving from past to future to past and back multiple times. This is most especially true in the section on Bill Stone.
So, what are the positives? First, the jargon and nuances of cave exploration are very well-spelled out. For someone who has never engaged in the activity, this was a very nice feature, as the terminology is at times non-intuitive to the outsider. The telling of some of the harrowing experiences deep underground also serve well to keep the reader interested. The short paragraphs make this a good book for reading before bed or during commercials on TV as the stopping points are quick to attain.
For those interested in speleology, this book is more than likely a must-read, while for those of us outside that realm, it's not the best tale of man versus nature-type exploration. Overall, it's not a bad read, it just seems like something with a very niche audience.
5 of 10 people found the above review helpful.
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Not Much Depth, May 16, 2010
By jd103
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I'd give this book 3.5 stars if that were an option; as I start writing I'm not sure which way I'll wind up going. I'll consider the review writing to be like following a new passage in a cave--will it "go" or come to a dead end?
I found this to be an interesting subject but wasn't that impressed by the actual book. It seemed like there was too much material covered in too few pages: too many secondary characters who are never more than a name before they die or disappear, too many expeditions and locations which seemed to blend together, two supposed main characters (although the page count leans fairly heavily in one direction--and the wrong direction in my opinion) who never meet or even mention each other as far as I remember, and who probably would have been better served by two books although the contrast between the two men is interesting. Sign me up for the Ukrainian team.
There were plenty of individually exciting passages, but somehow the whole never got any bigger than those parts. So if you will be content with nonfiction short stories, you'll probably be more satisfied than I was.
I've seen a criticism in several reviews which seems unfair to me regarding the lack of photos. There are photos available online. I don't know if they will be included in the final book, but advance copies almost never have photos and if they do they're usually of poor quality. So if photos are important to you, look at the actual book before assuming there aren't any included, or just fire up the computer while you're reading.
5 of 14 people found the above review helpful.
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An exciting but unbalanced narrative, May 12, 2010
By loce_the_wizard (Lilburn, GA USA)
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"Blind Descent" proved a quick read, as author James Tabor paces his account of "a heated race to find the bottom of the world" as though he were writing a high adventure novel. Indeed, most of the people profiled, especially Bill Stone, come across as made-up characters, more one-dimensional than real. The key exception, Alexander Klimchouck, comes across as genuine and grounded, but he is clearly second fiddle here, and more on that point later.
Briefly, the book centers on a quest to explore the world's supercaves. These are the deepest, most dangerous places imaginable. Mr. Tabor depicts them in all there intertwined glory and horror. I cannot imagine more perilous environments anywhere, and my encounter as an armchair explorer with their myriad dangers ranging from sheer vertical drops, deadly organism, floods, impossibly claustrophobic tunnels, raging whitewater, isolation, and mind-boggling darkness sufficed to inspire actual nightmares. And though his descriptions of subterranean splendor are no less well catalogued, it's the danger and challenges that rivet one's attention.
Although the book supposedly depicts a race between competing teams of spelunkers to find the deepest cave on earth, this premise does not really hold up. Neither Stone nor Klimchouk seems all that focused on what the other is doing--aware, yes--but the notion that these parallel quests were a race proves never seems on solid ground. Rather "Blind Descent" seems much more about Stone's expeditions than Klimchouk's: the first 151 pages are about Stone and company, than the next 40 are about Klimchouk and his group (and quite a few paragraphs contrast Klimchouck with Stone, a comparison not really played up in the first part of the book).
The author's presentation, consequently, is not balanced, and I found I wanted to know more about Klimchouk and less about Stone by the time I finished the first two parts of the book.
The third part of the book reveals which team achieved the distinction of finding the deepest cave floor during the 2004 expeditions. Mr. Tabor captures the excitement, peril, frustration, and jubilation of the respective explorers' expedition, but there is no strong sense that Stone and Klimchouck were engaged in a head-to-head competition.
On that point, I would only add structuring this book so that alternating chapters or smaller groupings of chapters devoted to both the American and Ukrainian quests would have heightened the supposed competitive nature of those quests. I kept wanting to know more about the Ukrainian-led group members, especially how their motivation and psychology differened from Stone's teams.
This book sorely needs illustrations and photographs to depict more clearly what a "sump" is, how airflow or water in caves provides clues to viable passages, what the underground camps and chambers really looked like, and what caver sees when suspended in the air over a black abyss. (I have been informed that the actual book is augmented with illustrations. My review is for an advance reader's edition. That said, I will leave my review as is because it reflects my experience but urge prospective buyers to see the comment to my review that corrects my statement.)
Five stars for excitement; two for narrative structure; = three stars.
5 of 14 people found the above review helpful.
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facinating story, distracting similes, September 20, 2010
By Adele Drake (St. Louis)
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A compelling read about an interesting subject. The prose is sometimes distracting and the book overall is bit too focused on personalities for my taste. I would have liked more technical information about caving and about the flora and fauna of cave environments but this would probably make the book boring for most people.
4 of 4 people found the above review helpful.
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Fascinated Horror, August 20, 2010
By Evelyn Uyemura (Torrance, CA USA)
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I had no idea what cavers actually do, but being a fan of mountain climbing books, I decided to give this a go. I read the descriptions of caving exploits in fascinated horror. The whole endeavor seems to involve facing and reveling in all of the most basic fears--fear of the dark, fear of heights, claustrophobia, and basically fear of death. I can't imagine how anyone could enjoy (if that's even the right word) such feats. If mountain climbing is a little hard to really justify, in terms of human lives lost, extreme caving is almost impossible to grasp.
But I give the book 5 stars. The author made the unimaginable clear and vivid to my mind. He skips rather lightly over the rappelling, which involves sliding down ropes into the pitch dark often through raging waterfalls. But his descriptions of diving actually made me feel the claustrophobia, the terror, the unbelievable danger involved. And what more can you ask of good writing?
And he did as much as anyone could to help me get a feel for the personalities of the men and women who engage in this extreme endeavor.
But if you feel a little choked up or panicky in the lowest level of an underground parking garage, this will probably not be the hobby--or the book--for you!
4 of 4 people found the above review helpful.
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Caving: great. Tabor's writing: not so great, September 25, 2010
By Saturday's Slave
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The stories and the people are fantastic, but sometimes I felt like I had to fight through Tabor's writing just to find out what was next. His analogies aren't the best, his words get tangled up in themselves, and sometimes things are just boring. All that said, I really enjoyed this book.
4 of 5 people found the above review helpful.
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Author trying too hard, October 6, 2010
By P. Merrion (Wheaton, IL)
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When I got this book I thought I was going to really enjoy it; 2 rival cavers competing against each other to discover the deepest known cave in the world sounds like the type of story I could really get into. Unfortunately, this story is hurt by a few factors.
First, the author's style is to repeatedly recycle content throughout the story. An example (cited in other reviews) is to frequently remind the reader of the dangers of exploring these supercaves. But after the 5th or 10th time of reading this, you as the reader say "I get it, it's dangerous in a lot of ways, do you have to keep telling me?". Another example is the author's repeated descriptions of Stone's obstinate personality. It is good to describe the personality of your protagonist at the beginning of the story. However, it is unnecessary to mention those same traits repeatedly throughout the story.
Second, the focus of the book is heavily skewed towards Bill Stone. While the description and summary lead you to believe the book is equally about 2 rivals trying to outdo each other, the reality is that 150 pages are dedicated to Stone while only 50 to Klimchouk (despite the fact that Klimchouk's team was successful in finding the deepest cave).
Finally, for a book that is 250 pages long, there are way too many chapters. I think I counted 49 chapters, which means every 5 pages you arrive at a page of white space. The author tries to end every chaper with a cliffhanger, but this technique, like the author's style, ends up coming across forced and needless.
Overall, I can't recommend this book to anyone.
4 of 6 people found the above review helpful.
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A matter of taste, August 23, 2010
By Jonathan A. Turner (Nashua, NH United States)
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I enjoyed _Blind Descent_. Had James Tabor made some different choices, I might have enjoyed it more. Or, to put the shoe on the other foot, I might have enjoyed it more had I been the kind of reader that Tabor is aiming for.
The book opens with a bang, and it's fast-paced and extremely vivid. Tabor puts a lot of emphasis on the "extreme" nature of supercaving--the cold, the dark, the hardship, the danger, the obsession. At first this is eye-opening. As the book goes on, however, the same points are driven home over and over. I can see how some readers might savor that aspect; for a non-extreme reader like me, though, the repetition eventually builds up. (It makes the whole caving process sound less like an adventure and more like an underground Gulag.) By contrast, you won't find much in here about the beauties of the underground world or the science of caves. That's just not what Tabor is interested in.
A related choice is that the book is unbalanced. There are nominally two principal cavers racing each other: Bill Stone and Alexander Klimchouk. Tabor gives a good, fair, interesting portrait of Klimchouk, but it's clear that his heart is with Stone. Klimchouk doesn't even make an appearance until page 156 (of 250), and even then he has to share the remaining page count with his American counterpart. The reason, I suppose, is that Stone is vastly more colorful, and fits better with Tabor's muscular storyline. (And I give Tabor credit, as well, for a nuanced and objective character portrait of his larger-than life protagonist.)
Even so, I think Tabor would have been better off interleaving the two characters and their stories. For one thing, he often resorts to a well-known writer's device--building tension by ending a chapter at some moment of tension or peril. That suspense-building device, though, really only works well if the writer follows it by cutting away to a different storyline for a while. As it is, all the reader does is turn the page and the tension is immediately dissipated.
Finally, there are moments where Tabor's macho subject matter and vigorous prose style combine to become pretty ... let's say "dramatic". Here's a quote (p. 111) that I think fairly represents those moments:
"By that time, Stone's anger had cooled and his ardor had warmed. Their celebrations included some postprandial activity that guaranteed that even if the cave did not set a record for depth, they'd established one of their own in Camp 6."
If you like those sentences, I'd say you should disregard my reservations and buy _Blind Descent_. If not, you might still like the book if you're interested in the subject matter. I am, and I did (though my favorite caving book is still Roger Brucker and Richard Watson's _The Longest Cave_). But you should be prepared for some melodramatic prose, in a men's-magazine kind of way.
4 of 6 people found the above review helpful.
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gripping and horrifying in first half, then runs out of steam, May 2, 2010
By Nim Sudo
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The first half of this book is a gripping adventure story of cave exploration. There is lots of drama, excitement, horror, and death. Flipping through it you quicky come across quotes like this:
"His first thought was: This can't be good. It was not. `Ian is missing. We need to mount a rescue right now,' Broad announced.'"
"Managing buoyancy in open water is scuba's toughest discipline to master. Managing the buoyancy of two bodies, one of them dead, in a cave sump is nearly impossible."
Etcetera. Not knowing anything about caving, I was cringing at all the scary things going on (which the author seemed to revel in), and could hardly put the book down for the first 150 pages. In addition to obvious dangers such as getting buried, getting lost, falling off a cliff, losing your lights, drowning, running out of food, etc., we learn about other bad things that can happen, such as The Rapture. The book also gives a good description of the more ordinary deprivations, tedious labor, and human conflicts involved in caving. Details of going to the bathroom and having sex are also presented (which makes me wonder, should we really be doing all this in delicate, pristine environments?)
Although the book had a great first half, after a while I started to get a little annoyed with it. First of all there are no pictures (although I am just reading a prepublication version so maybe the real version has some). After a while, primarily numerical descriptions of the size, depth, etc. of various parts of caves get boring and don't really give us a feeling for their beauty or interest. There are a few pictures on the author's website which add a lot.
Second, the author characterizes the story as a race to discover the deepest cave on earth, and hypes the end of this race as "the last great terrestrial discovery". Well, first of all, since the record for deepest cave has changed a number of times in recent years, maybe someone will discover a deeper cave before too long. Second, I think there is a whole lot about the earth remaining to be discovered. Third, the depth of a cave (apparently defined as the vertical distance between its highest and lowest points) is just some arbitrary number, and maximizing this number does not seem to be worth risking one's life. The book does not talk much about other reasons for exploring caves, e.g. what kind of scientific questions one might try to answer.
In conclusion, this book is a fun escape if you want to enjoy some vicarious excitement in the comfort of your reading chair.
4 of 6 people found the above review helpful.
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Excessively sensationalistic; many significant errors, May 1, 2011
By reidpr
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I really wanted to like this book. Caving is fascinating, and reading about it is utterly engrossing to me, perhaps more so than any other type of adventure writing. And, there aren't anywhere near enough caving books. Unfortunately, this particular caving book suffers from pervasive crappiness and fundamental errors which could easily have been avoided.
First, the style is needlessly sensationalistic and breathless. Did Tabor and his editors somehow think that a caving book would not sell if they didn't pump up an already complex and fascinating sport to the point of self-parody? It's a real bummer.
Second, the book contains numerous significant errors. For example:
1. The book misuses the word "sump". The correct definition is: a submerged passage. Tabor seems to use it to indicate any cave lake.
2. All the photos in the color plates are listed as "copyright 2010". That is not how copyright works - a photo is copyrighted as of the date it was taken.
3. The whole premise of the book is the search for the deepest cave that could possibly be. First off, that's a ridiculous premise; establishing a cave as the deepest possible rather than simply the deepest known would be extremely difficult and would certainly take years for the community to accept the claim. Second, the book itself claims both that this ultimate (i.e., unbreakable) record was reached ("they had made the last great terrestrial discovery", page 246; "October 18, 2004: Bottom of the world, 6,825 feet deep" on the last color plate) and also that it was broken ("In August 2006, ... pushed its ultimate depth to 7,188 feet"). How anyone can make such a blatant, fundamental error and call themselves a journalist is beyond me.
Bottom line, if you are desperate for any caving book you can get your hands on, like me, you will probably want to read this book. But it's not very good. And, if you are looking for someone to write a book about your adventures, find a different author.
4 of 7 people found the above review helpful.
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Blind Descent, February 8, 2011
By EngineersView (Northern California)
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While the topic is somewhat interesting the superlatives (if not in the strictest sense of the word), comparatives, and general cheerleading for Bill Stone make this book hard to read. Add to this the authors willingness to make ridiculous (rocks moving in microseconds)and provocative statements even if some of them are just stupid quotes or statements from Bill Stone and you have a book that is not worth reading. Even when the author moves onto Alexander Klimchouk he cannot help going back to Bill Stone.
I cannot recommend reading this book so I give it 1 star even though most people seem to still give 2 stars when they find a book unreadable.
4 of 7 people found the above review helpful.
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Typical of the genre these days., October 3, 2010
By R. Yaleburton (Echo Park, CA)
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Ugh. I get sick of the super-casual, in-your-face & obvious nature of so much contemporary non-fiction and this book is no exception. The prologue reads like a Hollywood or Reality TV show pitch to some HBO producer. So, I decided not to read much of Blind Descent as I prefer the mysteries of the world to remain unsullied by hacks such as this author. Funny thing is I never have this problem with older books.
4 of 8 people found the above review helpful.
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Race to the "Bottom of the World" not as Exciting as Everest or Titanic conquests, July 19, 2010
By D. Summerfield (Missoula, Montana)
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Author James Tabor has done a thorough job of researching his subject, but the subject itself may have deep-sixed his attempt at writing the next Into Thin Air: A Personal Account of the Mt. Everest Disaster. Perhaps it's the fact that almost everybody, at one point or another in their lives, has climbed a tree or a hill and experienced the satisfaction of reaching the top. That experience is in some small way comparable to the lure of climbing the highest mountain in the world. Most of us have also been to the ocean and stood awed by its sheer size, or peered through the thick glass at the local aquarium, fascinated by the strange creatures which are swimming on the other side. Then, when we read about undersea exploration, it's more understandable.
So what's the average person-on-the-street's experience with the lure of a "supercave" -- one that goes on for miles and is accessible only by rappelling in absolute darkness, wriggling endlessly through passages the size of a sewer pipe and diving for hours in frigid dark waters? The only relatable experience I can think of are some particularly nasty claustrophobic nightmares I have had.
However, because I do enjoy true-life adventure stories, and have read extensively about both the torturous failures and exhilarating triumphs of polar, mountain and ocean explorers, I was very much looking forward to tackling this book. But for the most part, I found myself struggling to follow the author's descriptions of what these enormous caves actually look like, what their lure is, and why they take such toll on these cavers. Despite great effort, the author never made me care very much about these caves or the people who explore them.
The book purports to tell the exciting story of the race to make the last great discovery left on Earth: the deepest cave. The author follows the exploits of two "supercavers": Bill Stone, an American, and Alexander Klimchouk, his Ukrainian counterpart. The stories of both of these men, including injuries and deaths which happened during expeditions led by each, culminate in 2004, with Stone in Mexico and Klimchouk in the Republic of Georgia, both trying to set a record for going deepest into the Earth, and prove that each had found the "world's deepest cave."
Unfortunately, despite the "deep" subject matter, the book is very flat. The author tries to create drama by using a lot of foreshadowing techniques. But many of the outcomes of the foreshadowing just sort of dribble off and die. For example, at one point he foreshadows one of Bill Stone's near-death experiences by writing: "And then, on March 15, time nearly ran out for him, literally." Then the next paragraph describes matter-of-factly that someone accidentally dropped a "big drill" and it almost hit him. I guess the reader is supposed to imagine how terrible that would have been, and I kept waiting for the punchline. But that was it. After I turned the page, I turned back and re-read it, certain that I had missed something. But I didn't. That's all there was to the incident.
Even when one team finally reaches "the bottom", it's kind of "well, here we are. I guess we better figure out how to get out of here."
For someone who is a caver, this is might be a much better book. I did learn a lot about caving techniques, equipment and lingo. However, I am not an polar explorer, and I really thrilled to Shackleton's exploits in South: The Endurance Expedition (Penguin Classics). This book just didn't do it for me.
CAVEAT: I read this book as an ARC, which had no photos. I just went to some websites which provided photos of some of these caves, and I think that photographs in this book would have added a star to this review. Now I am having an easier time envisioning the scope and beauty of these caves. I am now intrigued enough that I ordered a book by Bill Stone from a used book dealer, (a book which was recommended by this author in his afternotes) just to see if another author and some photographs will give me a better perspective on this endeavor and the people who pursue it. However, just on text alone, for this book, I stand with my 3-star assessment.
4 of 9 people found the above review helpful.
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Typical of the genre these days., October 3, 2010
By C.J. Hustwick (Riverside, CA)
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Ugh. I get sick of the super-casual, in-your-face & obvious nature of so much contemporary non-fiction and this book is no exception. The prologue reads like a Hollywood or Reality TV show pitch to some HBO producer. So, I decided not to read much of Blind Descent as I prefer the mysteries of the world to remain unsullied by hacks such as this author. Funny thing is I never have this problem with older books.
4 of 8 people found the above review helpful.
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Like "Into Thin Air", only down, October 21, 2010
By self-deprecating and proud of it (Tacoma, WA)
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Like Jon Krakauer's breathtaking description of a fatal trip to the summit of Mt. Everest in his book Into Thin Air: A Personal Account of the Mt. Everest Disaster, James Tabor's "Blind Descent" will by turns inform and amaze you with its description of extreme cave exploration.
As a person who has enjoyed the occasional stroll through a tourist cave, I was under the mistaken impression that I had some idea of what this exploration would be like. Tabor's book vividly brings to life the deprivations endured, the risks taken, the complicated logistics required, and the egos involved in the search for the world's deepest caves. A reader gets a sense of the all-pervading cold and damp, the physical demands in an environment where a single mistake can be fatal. The mental demands of living without sunlight or decent food for weeks were painted as such a vivid picture that I almost felt tired and cold myself.
Bottom line, if you enjoy descriptions of humanity testing its limits, I think you will like this very readable description of extreme caving.
4.5 stars
3 of 3 people found the above review helpful.
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Well-Written, Well-Conceived Adventure Story, July 29, 2010
By Todd and In Charge (Miami, FL)
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I love books of this kind, so I'm a bit partial.
But I loved the way Tabor framed this story as a race between two very different explorers, in very different environments, with very different management styles, temperament, and personalities.
Could the book have used a little editing? Sure.
I also would have liked more pictures and maps, or perhaps that's just an issue with the Kindle edition -- I'm not sure.
But in the whole I would recommend this book as a look at a relatively unknown yet massive achievement, which happened just a few years ago while no one was really paying attention.
3 of 3 people found the above review helpful.
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4.5 stars. REALLY like his style, July 1, 2010
By critters
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disclaimer: I've always had a special interest in caves, having visited a "semi-wild" cave about 30 years ago.
"Blind Descent" is quite a ride, although, personally, I don't get the groups' desire to be the first to the deepest place on Earth; I seem to be missing the competitive gene altogether. Still, the vast amounts of money and huge chunks of time spent and the constant potential for serious or deadly injury are most interesting. In my opinion, the author shows particular strength with his explanations of equipment or techniques that may not be familiar to the reader; his word choices are down-to-Earth and easy to understand, without being condescending. Taking an example from page 5, one which many people will be familiar, "A locking carabiner (an aluminum loop, about the size of a pack of cigarettes, with a hinged "gate" on one side) connected the harness to the rappel rack..." I have a carabiner in my pocket, but I'd have been hard-pressed to explain what it is! Similar explanations make the book very easy to follow, even for readers who know nothing about climbing. Bravo to Mr. Tabor for making a deeply technical subject so readable! Highly recommended.
3 of 3 people found the above review helpful.
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A Rare Find, January 14, 2011
By Moderate Risk (Lakeland, Florida United States)
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Let me start by saying that as a teenager I was a junior member of the Virginia Speleological Society. I am an experienced caver (spelunker) who has discovered and explored dozens of caves in the great cave belt of Virginia (USA). There are a number of good books on my type of caving and about the beautiful types of caves I have explored. On the other hand, "Blind Descent" follows some of the greatest most serious cavers on earth and gives the reader a rare glimpse into a deadly pursuit where only less than fifty people in the world are truly qualified. This is a world where death comes rapidly and unexpectedly; where camps are established for those descending and who stay under the earth for weeks in a world where there is a complete absence of light. Blind Descent lays out the dangers and challenges and allows the reader into a world he or she has no way of otherwise entering by experience. The unqualified may try to enter this world but they will be returned in a body bag, if indeed it is worth the risk to return them to the surface. Welcome to "Blind Descent." Enjoy the trip respectfully. Many have died to bring to you the world of supercaves where there are yawning abysses that are seemingly bottomless and massive enough to drop entire houses into without hitting the walls.
3 of 5 people found the above review helpful.
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Gave up after 60% of the book, November 2, 2010
By trishgoff
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Actually bought this book by accident, was browsing kindle store and clicked the 1-click purchase by accident. I had just read a good review, so I decided not to try and get a refund, and just kept it.
The book started out promising, and I was drawn into the world of caving, which I had absolutely no idea about before I started reading. The subject matter made the book exciting.
However, I didn't really enjoy the writing style, which feels impersonal somehow, and sometimes it feels like the author is trying too hard to make caving sound super dangerous. I got bored of it about 60% in and did not finish the book.
3 of 5 people found the above review helpful.
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Blind Descent, July 9, 2010
By MGoosto
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I give this a 3 star only because of the lack of visual experience that you get on the Kindle. This book has too many pictures to fully enjoy reading on your Kindle. While I absolutely love my Kindle the picture quality is still just horrible. You will have to read it on your computer, ipad or buy a hard copy to really see the details of the color pictures which really add to the story and give you a better understanding of what extreme caving is really all about.
3 of 8 people found the above review helpful.
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Stick to the cave diving., January 20, 2011
By Teach111
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I was fascinated with the the technical aspects, the imagery of the caving experience, and the conditions these people endured. But I was totally bored with the who slept with who, who said what to who narratives that seemed to pop up too often and last too long. I skipped a lot of pages....
2 of 2 people found the above review helpful.
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Enjoyable!, October 6, 2010
By JunkyardWisdom (Pleasanton, CA USA)
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The age of great explorers seems to be past. Discovers have reached every continent, the North and South Poles, the highest mountain peaks, even the moon. Other than continued expansion into outer space, what's left?
James Tabor's book Blind Descent answers that question with a look at cave exploration. Specifically, the quest to find the deepest place on the earth. The book focuses on two explorers, Alexander Klimchouk of the Ukraine and Bill Stone of the USA, and their pursuit to find the deepest cave in the world. It's a story of daring, science, pride and incredible risk. But then that's the story of most great explorers.
This was a fun book to read. The descriptions of life in the caves is chilling at times, and Tabor can go over the top explaining the risks (to the point that he seems to be overcompensating, as if to make the point that this is REALLY REALLY DANGEROUS SO TAKE IT SERIOUSLY!). But once you get past some of the gory details and long lists of things that can kill you underground, you realize ... these guys and gals are over a mile deep under the surface of the earth and hey, this is really really dangerous stuff and I should take it seriously!
A fun book, a well written book, and a topic that is overlooked in the stories of discovery.
[...]
2 of 2 people found the above review helpful.
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Reads like an amusement park ride, September 24, 2010
By maelje
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I thoroughly enjoyed this books -- so much so that it cost me a couple nights' sleep. I read it in two sittings, stopping the first night only because it was 3 in the morning and I had to be at work at 8 a.m.
"Blind Descent's" greatest strength is its wild ride of a story; this book reads and feels, in terms of pace, like a rollercoaster. Author James M. Tabor knows how to keep a tale moving. "It goes," as one of the cavers here would say about a passage that leads deeper into the earth.
The only reason I don't give it five stars is the writing and editing. While Tabor offers effusive thanks in the afterword to his editors, I think some of them let him down. Too much word repetition, for one thing -- in one passage here, "spectacular" appears twice in quick succession. And more than once, Tabor is guilty of cliched prose. Worst example: Not one but at least two references to someone's skull possibly being crushed "like an eggshell."
The story is tremendous. Two super-cavers, laboring on opposite sides of the world, are striving to discover Earth's deepest spot. In doing so, between the two of them they will have to deal with vampire bats, deadly snakes, terrifying vertical drops mixed in with more horizontal but horrifyingly cramped passages, and, worst of all for me as a reader, "sumps" -- underground watery chambers that can claim the life of even the most experienced diver.
"Blind Descent" hooked me like no nonfiction book has in the last couple of years. It's an amazing, haunting read.
2 of 2 people found the above review helpful.
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Wow! Great Read on Many Levels, September 19, 2010
By Dindy Robinson (Arlington, TX United States)
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Disclaimer: A free copy of this book was obtained from Amazon Vine in exchange for an honest review.
Blind Descent by James M. Tabor is about spelunking, but not just ordinary spelunking. It is about the cavers who risk their lives to explore the deepest chambers of the earth's caves. They do so for many reasons but the ultimate one is because the caves are there. One thing I learned in reading this book is that I do NOT want to be a deep cave explorer-- spending weeks being cold and damp is not my idea of fun, but I also came away with a great deal of respect and admiration for those who do.
Most of the book focuses on American caver Bill Stone who commits his time and resources into proving that Mexico's Cheve Cave is the deepest cave on earth, but Tabor also spends some pages on Ukranian explorer Alexander Klimchouk, who tries to prove that Krubera, a cave in the Republic of Georgia, is the deepest on earth.
What most impressed me in reading this book was how many people were willing to spend their vacation or what other free time they had doing nothing but digging dirt out of underground tunnels by hand, or toting supplies from one base camp to another simply because they wanted to be a part of the greater adventure, so they could say that they were part of the team that participated in the expedition.
I had a hard time putting this book down-- I was fascinated by the difference between the personalities of Klimchouk and Stone and how their management styles affected their expeditions. I was also swept up in the race between the two men and the pure suspense of the expeditions, as well as the tragedies of the lives lost in the explorations. But mainly I saw the book as a tribute to human nature and the need of humans to explore. I would say that anybody who enjoys adventure stories would like this book.
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inspiring, September 17, 2010
By petesnz
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For myself, a really interesting read. Not just a caving book but a lot more.
Human interest is a big part of the story.
The pure driven enthusiasm and dedication seems comparative to Forest Gump running. Why do it?
The quest to push the deepest cave on earth to it's limits is true adventure.
There is something gripping about caving that is like no other sport, go and try it and you will see.
Buy this book if you are a caver, or an adventurer/ explorer, or just buy this book anyway.
It kept my interest, and I don't generally read books.
Maybe this was one of the last great adventures left on earth!
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Fascinating account .., September 17, 2010
By L. Mountford (Bellingham, WA United States)
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I've been fascinated with caves since my first visit to Bridal Cave in Missouri. I've never had the opportunity or time to pursue spelunking seriously, but I enjoy reading about it.
So I was excited to be offered the chance to read and review Blind Descent.
This isn't about the casual hobby version of cave exploration; this is SERIOUS stuff. The author recounts the stories of two competing teams, one led by an American Bill Stone, one by a Ukrainian Alexander Klimchouk, in their attempt to reach the deepest place on earth. This is unexplored territory -- miles of dark and dangerous territory, subterranean chambers, cold, and the contrast between the two men is clearly evident. Stone seems to be driven more by ego, pushing his younger team in their exploration of the Mexican Cheve cave, while Klimchouk takes a more guiding approach to his team in the much colder Krubera cave in the Republic of Georgia.
I found the story fascinating -- the writer's style not quite so much. It's a little too full of cliches for my taste, but if you can overlook that small negative, you'll learn a lot about human endurance and fortitude, and more than a little about caves.
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Deep dread, September 15, 2010
By Exiled Yankee (usa)
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I have a recurring dream - thankfully it has become less frequent with age - of being entombed deep beneath the earth in an old tunnel, which collapses behind me. "Blind Descent" is like that dream brought to reality.
Books of this sort are fascinating, in a morbid sort of way - on the other end of the spectrum, I also just reviewed a book about climbers conquering one of the highest places in the world - and the same sort of people make up both underworld and high-altitude exploring. There has to be enormous ego involved; a lot of self-belief, fueled by a lot of real-time knowledge; and the ability to get sponsors to pony up the kind of support it takes to attempt exploration of this kind. It also calls for a cadre of disciples that will follow a leader blindly - in this case literally - to whatever ends that leader is driven to.
"Blind Descent" covers the pursuit, by two very different (and yet in some ways similar) men, in two different parts of the world. Bill Stone, larger-than-life, knowledgeable in probing the dark, unknown corners of the world, sure of his own superiority, plumbs Cheve Cave in Mexico to reach the deepest tunnel in the world; Alexander Klimchouk, a Ukrainian professor, is after the same thing in the Republic of Georgia. Stone's cave would seem to be at least marginally easier to take, climate-wise; Klimchouk's Krubera Cave is freezing, though less wet than Cheve. Both are followed by devoted younger cavers, although Klimchouk seems to have a better take on it; where the cave is all for Stone, Klimchouk constantly worries about his flock of young explorers, and counsels rather than drives.
Stone's ego seems to account for the fact that the author, James M. Tabor, devotes 150 pages to him and a bare 100 to Klimchouk, and even with that, Klimchouk appears to be mostly a surface advisor while knowledgeable members of his following do most of the real exploration. Similar in age - both men are in their 50s - Klimchouk has realized that caving is a young person's sport, and he rations his time underground. Stone wants to be there for the biggest moments. Stone takes the biggest risks; so far, however, Klimchouk is having the most success.
While this race continues to draw me, I don't understand the 'why' of it all. Scientifically, there doesn't appear to be any huge advantage to finding the deepest hole in the world; in no place in this book is there any description of something never seen before i.e. some deep-living organism, or a pure water source, or anything that can benefit mankind; the exploration is all. There is some small discussion of the beauty of the underground formations, but not one real solid reason was given for why so much money needs to be poured into digging deep. There is loss of life - not as much, or as randomly, as in high-altitude mountain climbing, but enough - and when there is loss of life, while the possibility exists to at least pinpoint many casualties of mountain-climbing, no such possibility exists for a good proportion of deep-cave diving. If you die down there, that's your grave.
The cavers endure long weeks of total darkness, filth, bad food, horrible working conditions, mental breakdown from being in such a place for so long, and there isn't a clear reward at the end. I kept waiting for somebody to find something earth-shaking (pardon the pun) but it was just more digging out blockages under extreme peril, forcing themselves through sumps (underground pools and subterreanean flooded passages) which threaten to stick them fast, and the very real possibility of falling 500 feet or more in the darkness to certain death. Still, this book is very readable, to those who, like me, are mesmerized by these driven people, who are happiest in the unknown deeps of the world.
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A Tale of Exploration and Bravery in the Deep Parts of the Earth, September 2, 2010
By spg (Boston)
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I'm a big fan of any sort of non-fiction book about the survival ability of human beings in extreme environments. I've read books about Everest, Antarctica, the Amazon, and Outer Space... and now I will be adding 'inner space' to the list. And it turns out that this story of deep caves and the people who feel the need to explore them is one of the most exciting books that I have ever read! I couldn't stop turning pages, late into the night, until I finished this one.
Blind Descent follows the journey of two high profile 'cavers': Bill Stone of America and Alexander Klimchouk from the Ukraine. We hear about their struggles through deadly cave networks, their drive to push their expeditions deeper through personal risk, scientific research, and almost unimaginable bravery. This book is filled with harsh stories of how dangerous these supercaves can truly be. The almost alien cave world is well described, and I really did feel at times that my dark bedroom illuminated by Kindle light was actually some cavern chamber thousands of feet below the Earth. Thankfully I don't have to worry about navigating a 500 foot cliff or scuba diving my way through a pitch black world of sudden dead-ends and surprise waterfalls. I have nothing but respect for the cavers in this book.
If you're into tales of exploration at all, then I'd highly recommend this book. I don't have many negative comments at all. The only thing I can think of is that there are some photos in the Kindle edition of this book, but the small black and white doesn't really do these supercaves justice - so I went online to check out a bunch of photos. I'd highly recommend doing this if you get into the book.
UPDATE: I just noticed that Bill Stone (one of the major players in this book) did a talk about cave exploration on TED. It's really interesting and provides a bunch of cool visuals. Here's the link if you want to check it out:
[...]
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Compulsive venturing in "Depths ot the Earth", September 1, 2010
By G.Brown (Houston, TX United States)
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Some men (and a few women) dare to venture into the outer reaches of our universe and return with exciting tales of their voyages. That is true of an explorer whose adventures are recounted in this amply annotated account of exploring Mother Earth. The explorer whetted his appetite by probing some of Austin Texas' caves and became a man possessed with the idea of reaching the earth's deepest possible level. His passion resulted in death-defying blind descents by his teams into cavernous places never before seen by man. This is truly a great vicarious adventure for armchair readers as well as younger folks who dream of "going where no man (or woman) has dared to go before" .... right here on earth!
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Full of information but missing a key ingredient., August 17, 2010
By Brian Reaves (Anniston, AL USA)
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The story of a group trying to find the "supercave" or deepest cave in the world really struck me as a "must read". While the story was interesting, the most obvious thing that should have been included was at least a few photographs here and there. I understand it would be hard to get a lot of them, but even a few photographs of the expedition team would have been better than nothing. This is a true story, not a novel, so it should have been possible. Still, the book is fast-moving and informative. I enjoyed it, but would have loved to have seen the pictures.
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I could feel the claustrophobia, August 16, 2010
By karmal64 (Obscurity)
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You can't get any closer to feeling as if you were actually there than this vivid account. Crafted in a taut third-person narrative, it skillfully renders the landscape as well as the unique personalities and their unique lives, people who were driven often at great personal costs and mortal peril, to probe the depths of the earth--throughout all of it rendered in prose reminiscent of a suspense novel. All in all, it was fascinating character study as well as a glimpse into a rare environment that few would ever willingly(!) experience first-hand. I actually felt like I was there!
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Belongs in every caver's library, August 5, 2010
By Ned Foster (Virginia)
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While I am only an occasional caver, I have done it enough to be able to appreciate the incredible energy and talent that these amazing explorers exhibited at every step.
I found this book to be absolutely riveting and read it in a few hours. Anyone who enjoys a high-end adventure story will be richly rewarded by reading this outstanding book.
NSS RL
12126
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Serious, Dangerous Cave Touring, August 3, 2010
By Rob Hardy (Columbus, Mississippi USA)
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If you are like me, your knowledge of exploring caves consists of joining a group who get tickets and pay a guide to go for an underground walk along footpaths. I enjoy such visits; they are nature walks of a peculiar kind. But for me to be able to pay for such outings, others had to go before and explore the cave, and they probably didn't do so for the purpose of making it a public attraction. These explorers probably were simply looking to see what was there, to push themselves deeper in as a manifestation of that amiable human trait, curiosity. And manifesting that somewhat less amiable trait, competition, some explorers have wanted to get deeper into caves than anyone else. This sort of competition, ranging into obsession, is the subject of the fascinating and scary _Blind Descent: The Quest to Discover the Deepest Place on Earth_ (Random House) by James M. Tabor. Tabor has made films and articles on various themes concerning man's interaction with nature. His previous book was _Forever on the Mountain_ which had to do with a disastrous ascent of Mt. McKinley, and in this one he repeatedly compares caving to mountaineering. There's a good deal of climbing in both, for instance, with rappelling ropes and pitons and other gear to use on stone faces. There's the problem of cold in both endeavors, with snow on the mountains; in the caves, the cold is supplemented by waterfalls and by pools that have to be transited. Deaths by falls are common in both caving and mountaineering. There comparisons end. Mountaineers don't have to worry about total darkness, for instance, and they always know to what peak they are aiming. Cavers are blind much of the time, and in a new cave, they can't tell how far they have to go.
That's just a start of the dangers particular to caving, dangers that I had not realized would be present until reading this book about cavers who take such dangers in stride. Besides falling to death in a cave, you can drown and you can get chilled to death. You can be buried by rocks. You can be blown off a ledge - there are hurricane force winds in some caves. There are poisonous gases, and some caves drip hydrochloric acid. There are scorpions and spiders. There are millipedes that secrete acid. Tinier but just as deadly are cave microbes. You might get attacked on the surface by natives who think you are stealing gold from the cave. You can simply get lost and not be seen again, and this is made more likely if in the dark you start hallucinating as people with no light stimulation tend to do. And if you run into trouble, and, say, fall and merely break a leg, no helicopter is going to come rescue you; maybe your buddies will be able to pack you out, but it might take weeks. I'll stick to guided tours, but this book is about two cave systems and dueling cavers attempting to get to the bottom of things. The first explorer described is Bill Stone, a "combination of Captain Ahab, Mr. Kurtz, and Spider-Man." Stone is impatient and driven. Stone's explorations recounted here have been into the Mexican caves Huautla and Cheve, and by 2003 he had done fifty explorations without proving that Cheve was anywhere near the deepest of caves. "For just about anyone else, it would have been quitting time," but Tabor makes clear Stone is not like anyone else. On the opposite side of the world, explorers at the same time were descending into the Krubera Cave in the Republic of Georgia. The cave is different, and so is the expedition's leader. Alexander Klimchouk is known to his team as "Father Klimchouk." He is a Ukrainian hydrogeologist who got his academic education and his caving experience in the Soviet Union. He may be driven, but he is calm and less intense that Stone. Importantly, he has the ability to delegate; he does not himself have to be the on-site leader as the team advances lower.
By 2003, Stone had reached 4,869 feet in Cheve. He has since striven to find that one passage that might link it with further channels downward, and remains convinced that it will be deeper than Krubera. But by 2004, Klimchouk's team had gotten to 6,825 feet, and named the chamber there "Game Over." The game, however, is not over; two years later a cave diver got to 7,188 feet in Krubera. There is a final difference between caving and mountaineering: once someone got to the top of Everest, that was it, and everyone knew that there was no higher mountain to climb. But although all the evidence seems to be that no one will go deeper than in Krubera, perhaps Stone will find that magic passage, or maybe there is simply some deeper cave system where we haven't even started to descend. Maybe some young person reading Tabor's exciting and sometimes horrifying book is getting the inspiration to find it.
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Excellent Adventure Chronicle, July 28, 2010
By Cactus Lover
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I love to read adventure stories and very much enjoyed Into Thin Air and Shadow Divers. Blind Descent is the first book I've read about cave diving and it is just excellent. I couldn't put it down from start to finish. The author goes into just the right amount of detail about the location, the people and the challenges faced by the explorers. I could almost put myself in those caves and feel what they felt. I really enjoyed reading it and highly recommend it.
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Danger in an Alien World, July 15, 2010
By Solvitur ambulando (Helena, Montana, USA)
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This is a fantastic true thriller of two competing teams on opposite sides of the world, going deeper into the earth than anyone has before. These caves, Cheve Cave (s. Mexico) and Krubera (Republic of Georgia) hold an eerie world of eternal night, no less hostile to human life and psyche than the depths of the ocean or the vacuum of space. Death and terror are constant companions. Against this alien backdrop of insane adventure, are the human dimensions of two extreme sports competitors, Ukrainian Alexander Klimchouk and American Bill Stone, and their teams and personal demons that drive them into these netherworlds for the age-old honor of being the first and the best. Riveting!
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Like "Into Thin Air" in reverse, July 1, 2010
By somethingexcellent (Lincoln, NE United States)
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Although I am a person who likes a little bit of adventure, I prefer to leave the death-defying type of stuff to other people, then read about it from the safe confines of my home with a small dog cuddled up on my lap.
As a tall fellow with a bit of a fear of confined spaces, what James Tabor has written about in "Blind Descent" made my toes curl in fear at times. A gripping account of two separate (and by all accounts, quite different fellows with almost opposite personalities in different parts of the world) explorers trying to find the deepest spot on earth, this book is incredibly gripping and engrossing. It sets things up with life-or-death situations (I won't tell you how they end) and basically doesn't let up from there, taking you on a bunch of separate journeys as the mega-cavers deal with everything from armed militias in contested territories to deadly micro-organisms, bouts of massive intestinal crunk, and psychological freakouts that sound absolutely terrifying.
My deepest moment into the earth was a private tour of the lower section of Carlsbad Caverns, but the stuff in this book puts that to shame by something like a linear mile. In some ways, it's like "Into Thin Air" flipped 180 degrees and plunged deep into the earth. Thrilling accounts of people with a lot more personal exploration fortitude than I'll ever have.
Dang, though, it's exciting to read about.
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Too much?, December 23, 2010
By Kellie Pease (Derby, CT)
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The book sounded to me like an interesting look into a subject I knew little about. I decided to give it a try.
There is a lot of information in this story. Information about the explorers, information about caving, information about the information. While I found the race, the difficulties involved, and the different kinds of people who would undertake the journey to be fascinating, there was just a lot of information that was kind of overwhelming. Too much about their personal lives, too much technical information. Maybe this would be more gripping for somebody more experienced in caving, but for me, I found myself skimming a lot.
Knowing about the types of information involved and the fact that the book is a little unbalanced, you may be able to tell if you would enjoy this more than me, or also feel a bit buried in information.
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The Upside-Down Version of Into Thin Air, July 29, 2010
By readit
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I originally got sent this book as an advance reading copy, and fell in love with it.
The many-sourced accounts of a whole athletic world I was unaware existed gave examples of dangerous feats (scuba diving in the world's deepest (?) cave, anyone?) that opened my eyes.
This book, sort of a hybrid of Into Thin Air and the Perfect storm makes for a fabulous read- get your copy now.
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Amazing adventure story, July 16, 2010
By Rancors Love to Read (USA)
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Blind Descent is a fascinating story about the quest to discover the deepest place on Earth. Our two main characters are Bill Stone, an American who has devoted years to exploring the vast Cheve Cave in southern Mexico, and Alexander Kimchouck, who is exploring the Krubera supercave in the Republic of Georgia. I knew nothing about the world of supercaves so I found the book to be particularly interesting. These are not the caves we visit as tourists to see stalactites and stalagmites. These are monstrous subterranean chambers that can go on for miles, and the people who explore them are far from normal. The conditions are always dangerous, and the cavers survive (usually) in unbelievably harsh surroundings.
I found Blind Descent to be a book that I did not want to put down and one that introduced me to a world that I will certainly never experience firsthand. An excellent effort by Mr. Tabor.
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Guano and spiders and deep water: OH my!!, July 11, 2010
By Lesa (Shelbyville , TN)
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This is about two of the world's best cavers: American Bill Stone and Ukrainian Alexander Klimchouk... these two men are looking for the same thing: the world's longest deepest cave.
This is a good book, well researched and has action and adventure galore... you can almost feel the water, the noise from the waterfalls and the darkness all around you.
These men and women explorers, experiance hunger, fatigue, hallucinations, injuries and sometimes death on their quest to find the deepest cave in the world.
This is not something I would ever choose to do, but this book gives youo such a good description of what is going on it is like you are there.... one passage describes a caver coming upon thousands of daddy long legs inches from his face, and every time he breathed they'd get aggitated.. (((YIKKS))
if you like action adventure it is the book for you...
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Remarkable Account of Earth's Last Frontier, June 28, 2010
By Walkerwoman (Richmond, Va United States)
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As someone who immensely enjoyed this author's earlier work, my interest in Blind Descent was peaked hearing Jon Stewart
describe it as 'stunningly fascinating' on The Daily Show a couple of weeks ago. Stewart's enthusiasm was so palpable, it
inspired me to get the book immediately.
It is both startling and gratifying to be able to read about experiences on this earth that to most of us are unearthly.
This work vividly portrays the courage necessary and extreme risk involved to explore this last physical frontier on our
planet. The exotic allure and terrifying 'faces' of supercaves are quite skillfully described. For me, with no personal
knowledge of caving, James Tabor opened the experience and made it come alive with helpful comparisons such as "like
crawling under your car(while submerged in water) thousands of yards."
I also appreciated the psychological depictions and reflections about the primary explorers. It contributed to making
this work even more interesting and multi-layered.
It is imperative to know all we can about our shrinking and ailing planet and our relationship to her. Blind Descent
should take its place as a classic among the other fine narratives that have helped us do so.
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blind descent the quest to discover the deepest place on earth, October 30, 2010
By A Customer
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this is well written but the author is a little consumed with hyprbole. comparing these cavers who are strictly in it for their own adventure to the apollo astronauts is ridiculous and insulting to the latter. these guys are daredevils and nothing more. tell the tale for the adventure yarn it is rather than presenting it as the scientific exploration it is not.
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Blind Descent, September 27, 2010
By jholladay
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Well written, informative, and captivating. Highly recommended to anyone interested in caving and incredible journeys.
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engaging and engrossing story that needs to be told albeit poor editing, July 3, 2010
By J. Spiro (San Francisco)
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Raced through the book quickly because the story is too good to take in a little at a time -- that pace is a necessary part of the adventure and enjoyment, unlike many books. At the same time, reading this on Kindle was crucial, because I found myself constantly looking up words, colloquialisms, and archaisms that the author really didn't need to use, and the editor never removed. The writing is very inconsistent (though the descriptions of caves are very good), but the content is rock solid. Also with the pictures were bigger and better quality in non-print editions -- you can find many of them online at [...] though.
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Excellent Story Not Told Completely Well, June 24, 2010
By maskirovka (Alexandria, Virginia)
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"Blind Descent" is basically a very good story and it's told well --most of the time. At its best, the author really brings home just how dangerous and exciting the exploration of supercaves can be. Having read this book, I have no trouble at all with the assertion that exploring some caves is more challenging than climbing Mount Everest.
But a few things made me decide not to give the story five stars:
1. The author pretty much hero worships one of his protagonists, Bill Stone. Stone is no doubt a very impressive guy, but some of the author's gushing about him being an "alpha-male" starts getting annoying. Despite the admiration the author obviously has for Stone, I got the impression that this was a very difficult man who was hardly a perfect leader (witness the dissension in two of the expeditions he led). I also gagged a bit at Stone being compared to the Antarctic explorer Ernest Shackleton. While I think Stone is a major explorer with much to be proud of, he's just not in the same league as Shackleton.
2. The book doesn't give the reader any sense of how supercave exploration advances science...apart from the re-breathers Stone developed. While I didn't want to read a treatise on geology, it would have been nice to know to how much all of this hardship the cavers endured advanced science.
3. I couldn't help but wonder if the author is premature in judging that Krubera is the deepest cave and there is no deeper one out there. How can he possibly know?
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Typing through tears, November 7, 2011
By Jen44
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I'm typing this through tears. I was only 4 years old when Chris Yeager died, but I remember it like yesterday. Reading the book I truly learned the details of why and how it happened and why people really want to do these things. It's a great book, really it is but I choose to remember cuddling up on Chris's chest every Friday night and hearing all the stories he told us about caves. We miss you Chris, over 20 years later. I sincerly hope people will read this book and learn.
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A Tale of Exploration and Bravery in the Deep Parts of the Earth, September 2, 2010
By Steve (HOLDEN, MA, United States)
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I'm a big fan of any sort of non-fiction book about the survival ability of human beings in extreme environments. I've read books about Everest, Antarctica, the Amazon, and Outer Space... and now I will be adding 'inner space' to the list. And it turns out that this story of deep caves and the people who feel the need to explore them is one of the most exciting books that I have ever read! I couldn't stop turning pages, late into the night, until I finished this one.
Blind Descent follows the journey of two high profile 'cavers': Bill Stone of America and Alexander Klimchouk from the Ukraine. We hear about their struggles through deadly cave networks, their drive to push their expeditions deeper through personal risk, scientific research, and almost unimaginable bravery. This book is filled with harsh stories of how dangerous these supercaves can truly be. The almost alien cave world is well described, and I really did feel at times that my dark bedroom illuminated by Kindle light was actually some cavern chamber thousands of feet below the Earth. Thankfully I don't have to worry about navigating a 500 foot cliff or scuba diving my way through a pitch black world of sudden dead-ends and surprise waterfalls. I have nothing but respect for the cavers in this book.
If you're into tales of exploration at all, then I'd highly recommend this book. I don't have many negative comments at all. The only thing I can think of is that there are some photos in the Kindle edition of this book, but the small black and white doesn't really do these supercaves justice - so I went online to check out a bunch of photos. I'd highly recommend doing this if you get into the book.
UPDATE: I just noticed that Bill Stone (one of the major players in this book) did a talk about cave exploration on TED. It's really interesting and provides a bunch of cool visuals. Here's the link if you want to check it out:
[...]
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Compulsive venturing in "Depths ot the Earth", September 1, 2010
By DyBrown (Houston, TX United States)
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Some men (and a few women) dare to venture into the outer reaches of our universe and return with exciting tales of their voyages. That is true of an explorer whose adventures are recounted in this amply annotated account of exploring Mother Earth. The explorer whetted his appetite by probing some of Austin Texas' caves and became a man possessed with the idea of reaching the earth's deepest possible level. His passion resulted in death-defying blind descents by his teams into cavernous places never before seen by man. This is truly a great vicarious adventure for armchair readers as well as younger folks who dream of "going where no man (or woman) has dared to go before" .... right here on earth!
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Another Solid Book via Tabor, June 15, 2011
By Harry M. Shin (Livermore, CA USA)
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1. I know nothing about caving, but that's part of the joys of reading; ie learning new things etc... As with Tabor's other solid book which I read a while ago (Forever on the Mountain), this is an excellent read. While nothing is going to match "Into Thin Air" for it's pure entertainment value (I don't how else to describe it), this is a nicely written book that will educate as well as entertain most folks. At times, the author is overly melodramatic and repetitive when recounting the perils of supercaving. Furthermore, the biggest criticism that I would note is that the two separate stories of Stone and the Ukrainian are exactly that, separate and thus doesn't really mesh well into one book. I think Tabor would have been better off just focusing on Stone and then letting the reader know that in the end, the Ukrainian team ended up finding the deepest cave in the world etc... Don't get me wrong, the Ukrainian story deserves to be told, but this is a book, this is storytelling and I'm going to assume that since J. Tabor is American and thus can read / speak English and the same with B. Stone, the amount of data Tabor had to draw from was immensely much richer for the American side of the story compared to the Ukrainians etc... and this is self evident in the book. The parts describing Stone and his expeditions are much more interesting than the Ukrainian ones...
2. Anyway, either way, an overall excellent book and a worthwhile read.
1 of 1 people found the above review helpful.
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A story of epic struggle, March 18, 2011
By CT Girl (CT)
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This book traces the efforts of several teams of extreme cavers as they try to find the deepest cave system on earth. I never realized that extreme caving is many times more dangerous than climbing Mt. Everest. There were times in the book when team survival hinged on one breath or one flashlight battery.
I never thought about how, once you struggle to the bottom, you still need to have energy & equipment for the even greater struggle of climbing and swimming back out. Anyone with an interest in the natural world would gain insight by reading this book. Recommended.
1 of 1 people found the above review helpful.
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Open this one if you dare!!, March 6, 2011
By J Elmgren
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This book is one that will scare the pants off you! I have never done more than walk into an abandoned mine but this is an exploration that is so much bigger than life and if it doesn't keep you on the edge of your seat than you must be lying down. It opens up a world that I had heard nothing about and shows in graffic detail just what commitment and sacrifices were made to get to the deepest point on earth, Spellbinding!!
1 of 1 people found the above review helpful.
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Obsession: the final frontier., February 1, 2011
By Bob Dougherty (USA)
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This is a fascinating account of a series of "supercave" expeditions. It does a nice job of conveying the tremendous physical and psychological challenges that must be involved in this extreme sport. As my first exposure to caving, it made me want to read more, so that's good.
I have to say, though, that the text itself often conveys, unintentionally, the feelings of confusion and disorientation that cavers probably experience. The book has more than its fair share of murky, flooded descriptive passages and narrative dead ends.
One area of confusion that I kept running into is the whole idea of a "supercave" and its context in the world of caving. Take, for instance, the idea of depth. The cavers in the book are obsessed with finding the deepest cave, but I don't think anyone actually defines cave depth. It's not that obvious, since many of these supercaves have multiple entrances at various elevations on mountain slopes. Is a cave's depth measured as the vertical distance between its highest opening and the lowest point that can be reached from that opening? Or is it the depth of that low point, measured from the surface above it? This seems to be an important distinction, as the water in some of the caves is shown to flow down through mountains and canyons into rivers on the earth's surface. This point is further confused by the author's metaphors about journeys to the center of the earth. We also see that the cavers don't hesitate to excavate their way into deeper passages; at what point does a cave become a mine?
The story-telling also has its unpredictable ups and downs. The narratives of the two caving teams, on different continents, read like completely different books. The author attempts only a few interconnecting threads, including cursory comparisons of leadership style and cave topography. The "competition" between the two groups comes across more as a superimposed narrative device than strong motivation for the teams, who don't seem to have much awareness of one another. And the degree of characterization differs vastly between the teams. As other reviewers have noted, the North American cavers get about twice as many pages as their East European counterparts. This struck me as unfortunate, as the North Americans come across as the more disagreeable bunch.
The chapters on the East European cavers seems to be less coherent than the other chapters. These chapters start with the story of a caver who experiences a horrible accident while rappelling into a deep shaft in 2003. Rescuers immediately bring the caver to the bottom of the shaft, but the reader is left hanging, knowing that the injured caver still faces a long, harrowing ascent to the surface. The next few chapters flash forward to 2005, then back to the 1970s. After twenty-five pages of this, it is 2000, and our hapless injured caver is mentioned again, parenthetically, as someone whom another caver had helped rescue. Wait - I thought that wasn't going to happen for another three years! The poor fellow isn't mentioned for another 12 pages, when the accident is described again from its very beginning, his rescue gets back on track, and we gradually forget about him.
It's not quite as annoying, but just as confusing, when we read how, while traveling to Kiev, a caver meets "a quiet man named Vasil, a talkative man named Sergey, and a pretty girl named Svetlana, who regaled the others with tales of her psychotherapy sessions." That's all we hear about this mysterious trio. Back in the caves, I kept expecting our hero to rappel into a 100-meter pit, ankle-deep in vampire-bat droppings, where he'd find the pretty Svetlana waiting, ready to resume her therapy stories. But alas, Svetlana and her pals have returned to the narrative nothingness from which they emerged, and we can only wonder why they made an appearance in the first place.
I've been trying to decide whether I should complain about the Afterword, but I'll just mention that it's kind of a buzz kill, and let you see what you think. Because, as irritating as much of this book's prose is, I still recommend it. I found myself being alternately fascinated, inspired, and horrified by the experiences of these cavers. I was even more mystified as to why anyone would risk falling, drowning or starving in such dark, miserable places, but some things are beyond even the best writers' abilities to explain. Human obsession: the final frontier?
1 of 1 people found the above review helpful.
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Exploring supercaves is dangerous business!, December 1, 2010
By Donald Engel
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This book tells the story of two explorers looking for rhe deepest cave in the world-one in Mexico lead by an American and the other in the Republic of Georgia lead by a Ukrainian. If you are looking for a book describing the beautiful formations and colors which exist in caves like Carlsbad Cavern you will be disappointed. However if you want to learn about the hard work involved in exploring a "supercave" then this will be for you.
Blind Descent describes in great detail the nuts and bolts involved in exploring deep caves. In Cheve Cave in Mexico this includes the extensive use of scuba gear to search through submerged areas of the cave. This is dangerous business indeed and not everyone will come out of the caves alive. Aside from the danger this book describes the exhausting conditions the cavers will endure for weeks at a time in their explorations. As James Tabor makes clear this isn't something done for the fun of it-it is truly exploration of new frontiers which is always difficult.
The book is also the story of the two primary expedition leaders Bill Stone the American and Alexander Klimchouk the Ukrainian. The two leaders are almost polar opposites in leadership styles and you can judge for yourself what the consequences are of those differences.
Blind Descent makes for a compelling read which almost has the feel of an adventure story-which in some sense it is. I found the book to be both entertaining and informative. Definitely recommended.
1 of 1 people found the above review helpful.
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Go Where Few Have Gone Before, November 27, 2010
By W. Capodanno (Bellevue, WA)
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After reading quite a few books on some of the world's most alluring and deadly mountains --- Everest, K2 -- and books on climbing to the highest parts of earth, this presented an interesting counterpoint. Tabor captures the world of deep cave diving and the world of extreme spelunkers attempting to explore the deepest caves the world has to offer.
Bring together no personal experience exploring caves and without any knowledge on the subject, I found "Blind Descent" to be a fascinating and at times a nerve wracking read. The individuals who pursue these caves possess some of the same characteristics as world class mountain climbers, except they enjoy spending their time in the dark, burrowing through rocks, descending giant waterfalls and into sinkholes and looking for air pockets that might lead to new, unexpored passages.
There are times when it can be a bit difficult to make a mental image of what Tabor is describing, especially without exprience exploring caves and without pictures (completely realize why there aren't) but overall, "Blind Descent" makes for a fascinating read about some of the least explored and least hospitable parts of the earth.
1 of 1 people found the above review helpful.
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Excellent, November 18, 2010
By Pen Name (Fairbanks, Alaska)
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I've never been caving and know almost nothing about it. However that didn't stop me from enjoying Blind Descent, a story of the race between American Bill Stone and Alexander Klimchouk from the Ukraine to find the deepest cave. While the story of the race between the two men is fascinating, I was more interested in the whole concept of supercaving. Even more dangerous than mountaineering, the book does a great job of describing many of the risks associated with extreme caving and the dozens of ways you can die from it. Cave-diving in particular is very intriguing.
Although the exploits of Stone and Klimchouk are interesting enough (and the book mostly focuses on them rather than providing a history of caving), I couldn't stop thinking about caving in general and how exciting it must ve to be thousands of feet below the surface in areas where no human has been before. Even three weeks after finishing the book, I still am excited enough to want to give some novice caving a try. Any book that is well-written enough to have me still thinking about it a few weeks later can earn nothing less than five stars from me.
1 of 1 people found the above review helpful.
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An awesome non-fiction book, July 13, 2010
By Serendipity (GA USA)
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I know nothing about caving, and nothing about being adventurous, bit I loved this viewpoint into a world I will never be able to witness otherwise. Very well told by the author in such a way I felt like I was reading suspenseful fiction, where I kept turning the pages. It did nothing for my spider phobia however!
1 of 1 people found the above review helpful.
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I don't know how they do it, February 3, 2011
By An Aspiring Woodworker (Nebraska)
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As a person who is rather claustrophobic, Blind Descent did a fantastic job giving me the willies. While it's certainly repetitive in its description of Bill Stone's type A personality, I found the book fascinating and well paced. It had a good mix of technical descriptions and narrative which presented the subject of Super Cave exploration in a way that a total outsider could understand.
I repeatedly asked myself how these folks could fit through the narrow gaps, windows, and trenches will balls as large as they must have.
1 of 2 people found the above review helpful.
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I Really Enjoyed Blind Descent - How About a Reality Show about Cave Explorers?, June 23, 2010
By Valentina (Fair Lawn, NJ United States)
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I'm a huge reality TV fan, from Survivor to Amazing Race, I watch them all. I especially like shows with elements of real danger, like Dangerous Catch for example. I also loved Everest: Beyond the Limit on Discovery Channel.
This book is a fun read, it doesn't 'jump around' like another reviewer said. I loved the profiles of 2 real-life explorers, fascinating! Still, one star off for writing style, while not as crazy as others have stated it, it's certainly not fun to re-read essentially the same sentence twice.
How about a reality show about cave explorers?! If as exciting as it was described in this book, I'd watch!
1 of 2 people found the above review helpful.
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Half-and-half, July 26, 2010
By Robert Doty (Lakewood, CO USA)
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I would never make a good caver. Just the thought of such tight places coupled with complete darkness gives me the willies. I might be wrong but that kind of claustrophobia would make me a raving lunatic in no time at all. I won't belabor the storyline since so many others have done that. To me this book was half gripping narative and half boring fluff. I would have given it four stars but for the ending. It was just like stepping out into thin air....suddenly there was nothing. One moment the story and then......the acknowledgments. What the heck???? It's still a pretty good book. I bought the Kindle version and paid too much.
1 of 5 people found the above review helpful.
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It Leaves Too Many Questions Unanswered!, May 17, 2010
By woodfairy (AL USA)
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This book just left me with more questions than answers. It's title is appropriate as it's a quest left unfulfilled. Maybe one day the book can be revised and pictures added, along with more scientific geological data but as for now it only introduces you to the dangers & commitment of these brave explorers. And if us book readers wanted to read info on-line or look on-line for pictures we wouldn't have chosen this book in print form. For one to be interested in the subject enough to get the book, we have almost always already seen what's on-line and thirsted for more. Unfortunately, this book did not ease that thirst for me.
1 of 12 people found the above review helpful.
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Extraordinary, December 19, 2011
By Jorge Losada (Union, NJ United States)
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An amazing story of courage, determination and human endurance. It is difficult to comprehend the life and death risks these cavers take in such unforgiven places, where several different skills need to be at their very best in order to survive.
I never realized the depth of such cavernous places and the amount of discipline, self confidence, steady nerves, and fearless determination that it demands.
A great story of amazing explorers that are unstoppable even among very trafic endings. It is truly a conquest of mind vs nature.
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Fantastic Account, September 18, 2011
By Charlene A. Lutes
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This was my first introduction to caving. It was absolutely enlightening, and I recommend it as an educational piece for public consumption as well as an introduction to the fascinating caving life that attracts so few. I have no desire to cave as I have done mountain climbing and traversed ice caps. If you want a non-fiction, true adventure that is educational as well, get this one. I doubt any other could top it.
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Exciting tale of hidden adventurers, September 9, 2011
By Rainy Day Reader
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"Blind Descent" is a true-life story of the teams of people who have dedicated (and sometimes lost) their lives to find and explore the deepest caves on Earth. They struggle out of the limelight, in obscurity and with little financial reward to spend months in perfect darkness and constant danger. In addition to the hazards of suffocation and crushing, they also face drowning and a range of life-threatening psychological disorders. Any mistake, any moment of panic can lead to injury or death. It's something that few of us can understand.
Tabor takes us into their lives and gives us a chance to see what life in a cave is really like. We see the different personalities and different caves in different countries and feel some of the intense rivalry which fuels their exploration. It's a gripping account, as intense and page-turning than the best thrillers.
I had never thought much about caving before but this really opened my eyes. Tabor lets readers experience a life they may never see, and he does it in a way which lets us savour every moment. After reading, I immediately forwarded the links to all my friends. Highly recommended!
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A story of epic struggle, March 18, 2011
By NatureLover (CT)
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This book traces the efforts of several teams of extreme cavers as they try to find the deepest cave system on earth. I never realized that extreme caving is many times more dangerous than climbing Mt. Everest. There were times in the book when team survival hinged on one breath or one flashlight battery.
I never thought about how, once you struggle to the bottom, you still need to have energy & equipment for the even greater struggle of climbing and swimming back out. Anyone with an interest in the natural world would gain insight by reading this book. Recommended.
1 of 1 people found the above review helpful.
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Obsession: the final frontier., February 1, 2011
By Bob (USA)
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This is a fascinating account of a series of "supercave" expeditions. It does a nice job of conveying the tremendous physical and psychological challenges that must be involved in this extreme sport. As my first exposure to caving, it made me want to read more, so that's good.
I have to say, though, that the text itself often conveys, unintentionally, the feelings of confusion and disorientation that cavers probably experience. The book has more than its fair share of murky, flooded descriptive passages and narrative dead ends.
One area of confusion that I kept running into is the whole idea of a "supercave" and its context in the world of caving. Take, for instance, the idea of depth. The cavers in the book are obsessed with finding the deepest cave, but I don't think anyone actually defines cave depth. It's not that obvious, since many of these supercaves have multiple entrances at various elevations on mountain slopes. Is a cave's depth measured as the vertical distance between its highest opening and the lowest point that can be reached from that opening? Or is it the depth of that low point, measured from the surface above it? This seems to be an important distinction, as the water in some of the caves is shown to flow down through mountains and canyons into rivers on the earth's surface. This point is further confused by the author's metaphors about journeys to the center of the earth. We also see that the cavers don't hesitate to excavate their way into deeper passages; at what point does a cave become a mine?
The story-telling also has its unpredictable ups and downs. The narratives of the two caving teams, on different continents, read like completely different books. The author attempts only a few interconnecting threads, including cursory comparisons of leadership style and cave topography. The "competition" between the two groups comes across more as a superimposed narrative device than strong motivation for the teams, who don't seem to have much awareness of one another. And the degree of characterization differs vastly between the teams. As other reviewers have noted, the North American cavers get about twice as many pages as their East European counterparts. This struck me as unfortunate, as the North Americans come across as the more disagreeable bunch.
The chapters on the East European cavers seems to be less coherent than the other chapters. These chapters start with the story of a caver who experiences a horrible accident while rappelling into a deep shaft in 2003. Rescuers immediately bring the caver to the bottom of the shaft, but the reader is left hanging, knowing that the injured caver still faces a long, harrowing ascent to the surface. The next few chapters flash forward to 2005, then back to the 1970s. After twenty-five pages of this, it is 2000, and our hapless injured caver is mentioned again, parenthetically, as someone whom another caver had helped rescue. Wait - I thought that wasn't going to happen for another three years! The poor fellow isn't mentioned for another 12 pages, when the accident is described again from its very beginning, his rescue gets back on track, and we gradually forget about him.
It's not quite as annoying, but just as confusing, when we read how, while traveling to Kiev, a caver meets "a quiet man named Vasil, a talkative man named Sergey, and a pretty girl named Svetlana, who regaled the others with tales of her psychotherapy sessions." That's all we hear about this mysterious trio. Back in the caves, I kept expecting our hero to rappel into a 100-meter pit, ankle-deep in vampire-bat droppings, where he'd find the pretty Svetlana waiting, ready to resume her therapy stories. But alas, Svetlana and her pals have returned to the narrative nothingness from which they emerged, and we can only wonder why they made an appearance in the first place.
I've been trying to decide whether I should complain about the Afterword, but I'll just mention that it's kind of a buzz kill, and let you see what you think. Because, as irritating as much of this book's prose is, I still recommend it. I found myself being alternately fascinated, inspired, and horrified by the experiences of these cavers. I was even more mystified as to why anyone would risk falling, drowning or starving in such dark, miserable places, but some things are beyond even the best writers' abilities to explain. Human obsession: the final frontier?
1 of 1 people found the above review helpful.
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Go Where Few Have Gone Before, November 27, 2010
By William Capodanno (Bellevue, WA)
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After reading quite a few books on some of the world's most alluring and deadly mountains --- Everest, K2 -- and books on climbing to the highest parts of earth, this presented an interesting counterpoint. Tabor captures the world of deep cave diving and the world of extreme spelunkers attempting to explore the deepest caves the world has to offer.
Bring together no personal experience exploring caves and without any knowledge on the subject, I found "Blind Descent" to be a fascinating and at times a nerve wracking read. The individuals who pursue these caves possess some of the same characteristics as world class mountain climbers, except they enjoy spending their time in the dark, burrowing through rocks, descending giant waterfalls and into sinkholes and looking for air pockets that might lead to new, unexpored passages.
There are times when it can be a bit difficult to make a mental image of what Tabor is describing, especially without exprience exploring caves and without pictures (completely realize why there aren't) but overall, "Blind Descent" makes for a fascinating read about some of the least explored and least hospitable parts of the earth.
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Excellent, November 18, 2010
By Scott
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I've never been caving and know almost nothing about it. However that didn't stop me from enjoying Blind Descent, a story of the race between American Bill Stone and Alexander Klimchouk from the Ukraine to find the deepest cave. While the story of the race between the two men is fascinating, I was more interested in the whole concept of supercaving. Even more dangerous than mountaineering, the book does a great job of describing many of the risks associated with extreme caving and the dozens of ways you can die from it. Cave-diving in particular is very intriguing.
Although the exploits of Stone and Klimchouk are interesting enough (and the book mostly focuses on them rather than providing a history of caving), I couldn't stop thinking about caving in general and how exciting it must ve to be thousands of feet below the surface in areas where no human has been before. Even three weeks after finishing the book, I still am excited enough to want to give some novice caving a try. Any book that is well-written enough to have me still thinking about it a few weeks later can earn nothing less than five stars from me.
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Two very different men, one goal...extreme caving, August 22, 2011
By Gwyneth Calvetti (West Salem, WI United States)
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I've long enjoyed poking into caves, of which there are many in the Driftless Area karst country where I live. None come close to the supercaves that are chronicled through two contrasting stories of two very different extreme cavers, American Bill Stone and Ukrainian Alexander Klimchouk. Both men are hoping to answer the question..."What is the world's deepest cave?"
Bill Stone's story comes first, as he takes on Cheve Cave in Mexico. As one of those who sticks a headlamp on to go into open and well traveled caves, the whole notion of diving through things like sumps with SCUBA gear, sleeping for weeks on end on ledges at different levels between sumps and the other not so glamorous aspects of extreme caving was eye opening in itself. The story of Stone's efforts to develop specialized rebreathing gear to allow for longer dives shows another aspect of this man's intense desire to reach his goal. The author paints a portrait of a man so driven by his desire to accomplish what has never been done that is akin to Machiavelli. Brash, bold, concerned always with forward progress. For me, not always a likable "character" in this adventure story, but engaging nonetheless.
Contrast Stone's personality and drive with the very methodical personality of Klimchouk, also trying to find what may be the deepest cave, Krubera, in the Republic of Georgia. You could not find two more different individuals, with different approaches to the same challenges, and in the end, that was what I found most interesting about this book. Along the way, I learned quite a lot of detail about cave geology and the challenges involved in exploring this world "down under," written at a level that can be grasped by those of us who never venture further than our flashlights can take us.
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Mountaineering in reverse!, August 14, 2011
By Anthony M. Frasca (East Setauket, NY USA)
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Blind Descent is the story of the obscure international competition to find the deepest cave on earth. We meet Bill Stone, a career spelunker, who explores supercaves in Mexico including Hualta and Cheve over decades. And Alexander Klimchouk who descends into Krubera cave in Abkhazia. The stories delve into the difficulties of spelunking including technical and psychological issues. There are underground rivers, gorges, waterfalls and sumps.
Stone's obscession with Hualta cave and the difficult San Augustin sump leads him to invent a rebreathing scuba system that creates controversy when an expedition member, Ian Rolland, an experienced cave diver dies suddenly trying to crack the sump. The author belabors the issue unnecessarily, mostly because numerous expedition members and others implicate the rebreathing system in Rolland's death. However, when Stone and his girlfriend, novice cave diver Barbara am Ende, crack the sump with the same system Rolland used it becomes clear that Stone's rebreather is revolutionary despite its complexity.
The title of deepest cave eventually goes to Krubera and Klimchouk's team.
The book is filled with the technically difficulties of descending into deep supercave systems. The story is well written and exhaustively researched however it does ramble on at times and perseverates over some issues that can be dealt with in one paragraph. Still, it is a worthwhile read and a window into the underworld exploits of spelunkers.
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Easy to read and entertaining, August 10, 2011
By Steez (Denver, CO)
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I found this book very engaging and easy to read. It was very interesting to learn about some of the complex operations that are involved in cave exploration.
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Five Five Star Topic, Negative One Star Writing, July 30, 2011
By M. T. Ochs (New York, NY)
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When I saw this guy Tabor interviewed on a talk show about his book, I immediately purchased it. That was my fault. So was the fact that I read more than two thirds of this book before finally shutting it forever. I had saved this book for months when I would read it at the beach for something entertaining and informative. I found it lacked both qualities, but it especially lacked any hint of good writing.
How did this guy ever get a book deal? Who was this guy's editor and how did he let such a piece of crap get published? Random House, what were you thinking? If these are your standards, let me show you some of my stuff and grant me a book deal, jeez.
First of all, this topic is fascinating, supercaving, this stuff should write itself. But apparently writers have to write, not topics. And Tabor cannot write. He can be trite. He can gush over Bill Stone. He can amaze us with his clever and innovative assessment of people as "Type-A" and "alpha males."
I always finish books, even poorly written ones. But I couldn't ruin my beach read like this. So instead I set a trap. I left it in the beach house among the stack of crap books for some other unsuspecting reader who will read the jacket and think, "Oooh! This looks good!" Then I picked up a book by an excellent nonfiction writer, Shelby Foote.
This book deserves one star, but supercaving seems awesome. I wish I could have read something that made me want to learn more about it.
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Interesting at first, May 30, 2011
By Kim Erlandson
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I found the book interesting and by half way through it became a bit tedious and boring. Overwritten at times. Some pictures to help understand the difficulties underground and drawings to visualize would be of value.
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What Did The Cavers Who Reached the Bottom of the World Name The Site?, February 17, 2011
By Author of Adventure Photogr.. (Boston, MA)
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When the team of experienced cavers reached the bottom of Krubera's Cave's floor and sat "in the center of the tricorner room's clay floor there was a circular, crater-like depression about 3 feet in diameter and 2 feet deep. Down at its bottom, the hole came to a point, like the drain in a sink (which it might well have been at one time), and in that spot was lodged a small white rock." With their altimeter they determined that the white rock was at a depth of 2,080 meters. "The assembled team erupted with cheers.
These were educated, sophisticated scientists and explorers. They knew that they were experiencing one of the signal moments of history, the last link in a long, hallowed chain created by Peary at the North Pole, Amundsen at the South, Hilary and Norgay on Everest, Piccard and Walsh in Challenger Deep, and many other, earlier greats who had paved the way for modern explorers...they had just made the last great terrestrial discovery."
These cavers had won a race to find the deepest hole on all the world's continents. They had been exploring Krubera Cave while another competing team had been exploring the depths of Cheve Cave in southern Mexico. Both these teams of devoted scientists had spent years trying to find the deepest point of dry land on the planet. There may be deeper caves in the trenches of the oceans, but men will probably never personally visit them. The water pressure would crush all life out of them.
Bill Stone and Alexander Kimchouk were very much alike and neither knew whether their team or others would win the unofficial race to map the world's deepest caves. Assuming both teams of scientists and explorers were equally talented and devoted to their task, the team that would win the race was already decided. The deepest cave would be the deepest cave. The explorers had no way of knowing in advance which cave to choose for their attempt for a place in the history of exploration. Only the gods of caves knew which cavern was the deepest.
Men have always sought to explore the remotest parts of their world. Cavers are no different and for the elites of these adventurers into the darkness and dampness of the subterranean world, this dangerous avocation can become a compulsion.
Of the two rival groups of cavers described in this excellent book, there was almost nothing that would halt their search for the deepest hole on the planet.
In order to discover which team of explorers won this race and to read in detail about both their life and death plunges into the Jules Vern's Journey to the Center of the Earth-like trek, climb, crawl, tight squeezes and scuba diving inside the intestines of the planet, the reader of this review will have to read this excellent real-life adventure book. Like the fictional Star Ship captains of the future, these adventurers dreamed of going where no human had been before--to discover what no human had ever seen. Their eyes however were fixed on the inner world of Planet Earth and not on the stars above.
Once this achievement was accomplished, the survivors of both cave explorations have continued on their professional careers.
While still searching for an even deeper cave, engineer Bill Stone, leader of one of the cave exploring teams has continued to pursue another of his dreams. He is "building a NASA-funded interplanetary robot named Endurance. If all goes according to plan, sometime in the next decade Endurance will be flown to Jupiter's moon Europa, where it will search for water. Before that, though, Stone himself may go to our own moon. He has vowed, publicly, to establish the first commercial mining operations there by 2017."
By the way, the official geographic name of the point officially designated, as "bottom of the world" is "Game Over."
0 of 1 people found the above review helpful.
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Almost a classic., February 16, 2011
By J. Rodgers
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three and a half stars
The good; A great story about cave exploration obviously written by a caver, he gets everything right and does a great job at portraying the social and technical aspects of caving.
The bad; Too biographical and bordering on hero worship of Bill Stone. massive over dramatisation , hyped it up , over emphasised the dangers etc, etc
Dont get me wrong, I really enjoyed this book, and there is a great deal to enjoy but more often then not this book had me rolling my eyes at the needless drama. He didnt need to do this as like the classics 'the perfect storm' and 'into thin air' danger and adventure at this level usually speak for themselves. With a few days extra editing this could have been a timeless classic.
0 of 2 people found the above review helpful.
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The Subject Matter is really the star here, August 20, 2010
By Paul Fields (Washington, DC)
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I posted a reply to the 1 Star review, and decided to write my own review and include it here since comments to reviews don't get read much.
I didn't like the author's writing style, if somoene else had written the same story and kept up the tension, it would have been a better read. There is plenty of places for dramatic tension with people dying and barely escaping death, for that. If you want a dry academic text, I have to say the author isn't boring enough.
Anyhow some folks were put off by the author citing the Flat Earth, and that he never went into a cave himself, and the the book written off personal accounts and articles would be full of bias and myth. What follows is my reply to those folks.
If you read the book, I listened to the unabridged audiobook, you would know that Tabor talked a lot about his sources and you would know that some folks in the caving community had no love for Bill Stone. He mentions articles and interviews that were quite unflattering, to Stone.
I think there is a lot of negative press on Stone that was mentioned in passing, as well as some of the positive press, most of that is background to the personal accounts. The people that think Stone was reckless and people died on his watch weren't part of his later expeditions so focussing too much on them wouldn't benefit the story. I believe I got a reasonable account of the 30+ year story, and there were enough expedition journals and computer logs to make the veracity of any of the hard data difficult to fake. So the accounts are good enough for what you're getting here.
What I couldn't stand was Tabor's writing style, that guy never met a cliche he didn't like. So I agree with the 1 Star reviewer's comment that the flourishes of prose bothered the hell out of me.
If you had read the book you would know that this kind of cave diving is hard enough it would have taken the author years of training to not be a liability on any expedition, and since the book covers 30 years in 2 countries, which expeditions would the reviewer have wanted him to go on. Its certainly possible to write a passable book on the subject without having done it all yourself.
In the first chapter the author tried way too hard out to make the case Cave Divers were like Ocean Navigators of Old, Mountain Climbers of Everest, South Pole explorers and Astronauts all rolled into one. There are parallels, and NASA is doing some work with Cave Explorers, but in the intro it's just too forced, but don't let that put you off an otherwise enjoyable book.
0 of 2 people found the above review helpful.
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Good technical book for those into caving, August 16, 2010
By C. Brock (Apex NC)
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This book had a great deal of technical information on caving but was short on getting into the minds and lives of those involved. Best for those who like lots of detail over human story.
0 of 2 people found the above review helpful.
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Disappointment, January 8, 2012
By Armchair Will (Atlanta, GA)
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Sorry, I desperately wanted to like this book, the subject is certainly compelling, but it was far too difficult to get past the cheerleading and adulation for the main character. Someone please drop this volume in the world's deepest "known" cave and find an author who doesn't gush so much and try again.
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Cool Book, November 23, 2011
By Robert Winn
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I'm no caver, but I loved this book. Makes you feel like you are in the cave, exploring where nobody has ever been. If you like extreme sports, you will like this book.
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Good book very informative, October 28, 2011
By diana Teeter
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I am almost finished with this book and I have enjoyed it. There's a lot of information about cave exploration and I found
that all very informational. I enjoy learning new things and this book has given me a new respect for those individuals who have dedicated their life to
this science.
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What Did The Cavers Who Reached the Bottom of the World Name The Site?, February 17, 2011
By Author of Boston's Notable .. (Boston, MA)
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When the team of experienced cavers reached the bottom of Krubera's Cave's floor and sat "in the center of the tricorner room's clay floor there was a circular, crater-like depression about 3 feet in diameter and 2 feet deep. Down at its bottom, the hole came to a point, like the drain in a sink (which it might well have been at one time), and in that spot was lodged a small white rock." With their altimeter they determined that the white rock was at a depth of 2,080 meters. "The assembled team erupted with cheers.
These were educated, sophisticated scientists and explorers. They knew that they were experiencing one of the signal moments of history, the last link in a long, hallowed chain created by Peary at the North Pole, Amundsen at the South, Hilary and Norgay on Everest, Piccard and Walsh in Challenger Deep, and many other, earlier greats who had paved the way for modern explorers...they had just made the last great terrestrial discovery."
These cavers had won a race to find the deepest hole on all the world's continents. They had been exploring Krubera Cave while another competing team had been exploring the depths of Cheve Cave in southern Mexico. Both these teams of devoted scientists had spent years trying to find the deepest point of dry land on the planet. There may be deeper caves in the trenches of the oceans, but men will probably never personally visit them. The water pressure would crush all life out of them.
Bill Stone and Alexander Kimchouk were very much alike and neither knew whether their team or others would win the unofficial race to map the world's deepest caves. Assuming both teams of scientists and explorers were equally talented and devoted to their task, the team that would win the race was already decided. The deepest cave would be the deepest cave. The explorers had no way of knowing in advance which cave to choose for their attempt for a place in the history of exploration. Only the gods of caves knew which cavern was the deepest.
Men have always sought to explore the remotest parts of their world. Cavers are no different and for the elites of these adventurers into the darkness and dampness of the subterranean world, this dangerous avocation can become a compulsion.
Of the two rival groups of cavers described in this excellent book, there was almost nothing that would halt their search for the deepest hole on the planet.
In order to discover which team of explorers won this race and to read in detail about both their life and death plunges into the Jules Vern's Journey to the Center of the Earth-like trek, climb, crawl, tight squeezes and scuba diving inside the intestines of the planet, the reader of this review will have to read this excellent real-life adventure book. Like the fictional Star Ship captains of the future, these adventurers dreamed of going where no human had been before--to discover what no human had ever seen. Their eyes however were fixed on the inner world of Planet Earth and not on the stars above.
Once this achievement was accomplished, the survivors of both cave explorations have continued on their professional careers.
While still searching for an even deeper cave, engineer Bill Stone, leader of one of the cave exploring teams has continued to pursue another of his dreams. He is "building a NASA-funded interplanetary robot named Endurance. If all goes according to plan, sometime in the next decade Endurance will be flown to Jupiter's moon Europa, where it will search for water. Before that, though, Stone himself may go to our own moon. He has vowed, publicly, to establish the first commercial mining operations there by 2017."
By the way, the official geographic name of the point officially designated, as "bottom of the world" is "Game Over."
0 of 1 people found the above review helpful.
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Almost a classic., February 16, 2011
By J. Rodgers
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|
three and a half stars
The good; A great story about cave exploration obviously written by a caver, he gets everything right and does a great job at portraying the social and technical aspects of caving.
The bad; Too biographical and bordering on hero worship of Bill Stone. massive over dramatisation , hyped it up , over emphasised the dangers etc, etc
Dont get me wrong, I really enjoyed this book, and there is a great deal to enjoy but more often then not this book had me rolling my eyes at the needless drama. He didnt need to do this as like the classics 'the perfect storm' and 'into thin air' danger and adventure at this level usually speak for themselves. With a few days extra editing this could have been a timeless classic.
0 of 2 people found the above review helpful.
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