The Survivors Club: The Secrets and Science that Could Save Your Life » (Reprint)

Award-winning journalist Ben Sherwood is a former broadcast producer for NBC Nightly News and executive producer of Good Morning, America. In addition, he is a bestselling author whose novel The Man Who Ate the 747 was published in 13 languages. He lives with his wife and son in Los Angeles.

Which is the safest seat on an airplane? Where is the best place to have a heart attack? Why does religious observance add years to your life? How can birthdays be hazardous to your health?


THE SURVIVORS CLUB


Each second of the day, someone in America faces a crisis, whether it's a car accident, violent crime, serious illness, or financial trouble. Given the inevitability of adversity, we all wonder: Who beats the odds and who surrenders? Why do some people bound back and others give up? How can I become the kind of person who survives and thrives?


The fascinating, hopeful answers to these questions are found in THE SURVIVORS CLUB. In the tradition of Freakonomics and The Tipping Point, this book reveals the hidden side of survival by combining astonishing true stories, gripping scientific research, and the author's adventures inside the U.S. military's elite survival schools and the government's airplane crash evacuation course.


With THE SURVIVORS CLUB, you can alsodiscover your own Survivor IQ through a powerful Internet-based test called the Survivor Profiler. Developed exclusively for this book, the test analyzes your personality and generates a customized report on your top survivor strengths.


There is no escaping life's inevitable struggles. But THE SURVIVORS CLUB can give you an edge when adversity strikes.

Publishers Weekly

Sherwood (The Man Who Ate the 747), a writer for the L.A. Times, travels worldwide to gain insight from people who have survived a slew of near fatal phenomena ranging from a mountain lion attack to a Holocaust concentration camp, and interviewing an array of experts to understand the psychology, genetics and jumble of other little things that determines whether we live or die. Readers curious about their own "survivor profile" can take an Internet test, which is explained in the book's later pages. Sherwood's assertion that survival is "a way of perceiving the world around you" is enlightening, as are some of the facts he uncovers: you have 90 seconds to leave a plane crash before the cabin temperature becomes unbearable; luck has more to do with personal perspective than chance. But Sherwood's balance of self-help, scientific theories and first-rate reporting is diminished by occasionally overwrought prose as well as the countless survivors' stories, which can run together in a touchy-feely stream of faith and optimism. (Jan.)

Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.