Whenever I see the first example of a current events title arrive in the store, I tend to assume that it’s not a very good book. This probably isn’t entirely fair — I’m sure that some very good books have been written very quickly, and I have read enough of them to know they exist. Thomas Sowell’s The Housing Boom and Bust, for example, was released in May of 2009, just months after the collapse, and I found it to be an extremely well-written and important book, as did John. The books that hit the market later may be more comprehensive, but it doesn’t mean the first book can’t be excellent in its own right.
With that in mind, I wasn’t immediately impressed when the first copy of 33 Men arrived in the store. Mentally I categorized it as a hastily-written attempt to cash in before the Chilean mining rescue fell completely off the national radar, but I’m a sucker for the glossy photo inserts in nonfiction books, so I flipped through it anyway. As I did, something on the front dustjacket flap caught my eye — the author, Jonathan Franklin, is an American journalist who has been living in Chile for 15 years as a Guardian correspondent, and was the only journalist given a “Rescue Team” pass. That pass gave Franklin full access to the rescue operation as well as access to the trapped miners through the video system the rescue team had set up.
What we have here isn’t a cobbled-together rehashing of the same news headlines and reports everyone read in August of 2010 — this is a story, written by the one person that had both the necessary access and ability, the one person perfectly placed to record and deliver that story to readers who want something beyond 24-hour news-cycle headlines and TV melodrama.
We’ve got a couple copies of 33 Men faced out on the shelf in the Adventure section — if you see them, don’t make the same mistake I nearly did — go ahead and pick one up, flip through it and read a little.
Comments are closed.