Disaster Falls

by Stephane Gerson

  GRIEF AND CHILDREN

  Homer, The Odyssey, trans. Robert Fitzgerald (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1998); Seneca, “To Marcia on Consolation,” bit.ly/1qnPjco; Ben Jonson, “On My First Sone” (1603), poets.org/​poetsorg/​poem/​my-first-son; Letters to and from the Late Samuel Johnson, 2 vols. (London: A. Strahan and T. Cadell, 1778); Victor Hugo, Les Contemplations (1856), in his Oeuvres poétiques, 3 vols., ed. Pierre Albouy (Paris: Gallimard, 1964–74), and The Essential Victor Hugo, trans. E. H. and A. M. Blackmore (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984); The Poems of Emily Dickinson, ed. R. W. Franklin (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999); Stéphane Mallarmé, For Anatole’s Tomb, trans. Patrick McGuinness (Manchester: Carcanet, 2003 [first pub. 1961]) [I slightly amended this translation]; Georges Rodenbach, Bruges-la-Morte (Paris: GF-Flammarion, 1998 [first pub. 1892]); W. E. B. Du Bois, “Dawn of Mourning” (1899), reprinted in Lapham’s Quarterly (Winter 2012), http://www.laphamsquarterly.org/​family/​dawn-mourning; Paul Gauguin, Letters to His Wife and Friends, trans. H. J. Stenning (Cleveland: World Publishing, 1949 [first pub. 1946]); Romain Rolland, Journey Within (New York: Philosophical Library, 1947 [first pub. 1942]); Philippe Forest, Tous les enfants sauf un (Paris: Gallimard, 2007); Annie Ernaux, L’ autre fille (Paris: Nil, 2011).

  I have reproduced a few lines from my Nostradamus: How an Obscure Renaissance Astrologer Became the Modern Prophet of Doom (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2012).

  I also found evocative vignettes in Pat Jalland, Death in the Victorian Family (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996); Ginette Raimbault, Lorsque l’enfant disparaît (Paris: Odile Jacob, 1996); Julia-Marie Strange, Death, Grief, and Poverty in Britain, 1870-1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005); Drew Gilpin Faust, This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War (New York: Knopf, 2008); Jill Lepore, The Mansion of Happiness: A History of Life and Death (New York: Knopf, 2012).

  BELARUS AND THE HOLOCAUST

  Memorial Book of the Community of Bobruisk and Its Surroundings, ed. Y. Slutski (Tel-Aviv: Former Residents of Bobruisk in Israel and the U.S.A., 1967), 2 vols., online translation directed by David Gordon, http://www.jewishgen.org/​yizkor/​bobruisk/​bysktoc1.html; The Einsatzgruppen Reports: Selections from the Dispatches of the Nazi Death Squads’ Campaign Against the Jews, July 1941-January 1943, eds. Yitzhak Arad, Shmuel Krakowski, and Shmuel Spectors (New York: Holocaust Library, 1990); Samuel D. Kassow, Who Will Write Our History? Rediscovering a Hidden Archive From the Warsaw Ghetto (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2007 [repr. Vintage Books, 2009]); Barbara Epstein, The Minsk Ghetto, 1941-1943: Jewish Resistance and Soviet Internationalism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008); Timothy Snyder, “Holocaust: The Ignored Reality,” New York Review of Books, July 16, 2009; Yitzhak Arad, The Holocaust in the Soviet Union (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2009); Waitman Wade Beorn, Marching into Darkness: The Wehrmacht and the Holocaust in Belarus (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014).

  THE GREEN RIVER

  Literary and firsthand accounts. Washington Irving, The Adventures of Captain Bonneville, U.S.A., in the Rocky Mountains and the Far West (1859), in Life and Works of Washington Irving (New York: Pollard & Moss, 1882); E. O. Beaman, “The Cañon of the Colorado, and the Moquis Pueblos,” Appletons’ Journal 11 (April 25, 1874): 513–16; George T. Ferris, Our Native Land: or, Glances at American Scenery and Places, With Sketches of Life and Adventure (New York: D. Appleton, 1882); Theodore Roosevelt, Ranch Life and the Hunting-Trail (New York: Century, 1888); Ellsworth L. Kolb, Through the Grand Canyon from Wyoming to Mexico (New York: Macmillan, 1915); Ann Zwinger, Run, River, Run: A Naturalist’s Journey Down One of the Great Rivers of the American West (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1975); Ellen Meloy, Raven’s Exile: A Season on the Green River (New York: H. Holt, 1994); Alan Blackstock, ed., A Green River Reader (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2005).

  John Wesley Powell’s expeditions. Powell, The Exploration of the Colorado River and Its Canyons, introduced by Wallace Stegner (New York: Penguin, 1987 [first pub. 1874]); Frederick S. Dellenbaugh, The Romance of the Colorado River: The Story of Its Discovery in 1540, With an Account of the Later Exploration (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1909 [first pub. 1902]); Francis Marion Bishop, “Personal Reminiscences of John W. Powell,” Transactions of the Utah Academy of Sciences 2 (1921): 16–27; Edward Dolnick, Down the Great Unknown: John Wesley Powell’s 1869 Journey of Discovery and Tragedy Through the Grand Canyon (New York: HarperCollins, 2001); Donald Worster, A River Running West: The Life of John Wesley Powell (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001).

  River runnings. Randall Henderson, “Boat Trip in the Canyon of Lodore,” The Desert Magazine 19 (July 1956): 4–9; Colin Fletcher, River: One Man’s Journey Down the Colorado, Source to Sea (New York: Random House, 1997); Roy Webb, ed., High Wide and Handsome: The River Journals of Norman D. Nevills (Logan, UT: Utah State University Press, 2005); “Green River Rafting Trip,” August 10, 2006, Keseyscape blog, http://kesey.typepad.com/​keseyscape/; Jeffrey St. Clair, “At Disaster Falls,” Counterpunch (October 6–8, 2007), bit.ly/1UG9xdM; Roy Webb, Riverman: The Story of Bus Hatch, 3rd ed. (Flagstaff, AZ: Fretwater Press, 2008); Chris LeCheminant, “A Near Disaster in Disaster Falls,” June 11, 2012, bit.ly/13F3h6h.

  Guidebooks. G. E. Untermann and B. R. Untermann, A Popular Guide to the Geology of Dinosaur National Monument (Jensen, UT: Dinosaur Nature Association, 1969); Philip T. Hayes and George C. Simmons, River Runner’s Guide to Dinosaur National Monument and Vicinity (Denver: Powell Society, 1973); William McGinnis, Whitewater Rafting (New York: Quadrangle/New York Times, 1975); Roderick Nash and Robert O. Collins, The Big Drops: The Legendary Rapids of the American West, rev. ed. (Boulder, CO: Johnson Books, 1989); Gary C. Nichols, River Runner’s Guide to Utah and Adjacent Areas, rev. ed. (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2002); Carolyn Sutton, The Family Guide to Colorado’s National Parks and Monuments (Englewood, CO: Westcliffe Publishers, 2006); Buzz Belknap and Loie Belknap Evans, Belknap’s Waterproof Dinosaur River Guide, new ed. (Evergreen, CO: Westwater Books, 2008).

  Newspapers. Craig Daily Press, Los Angeles Times, Salt Lake Telegram, Vernal Express.

  Alison and Julian allowed me to write a story that, while my own, is theirs as well. Before starting out, I told Alison there would be a great deal about her, as a real person but also, inevitably, as a character. It will be you, I explained, but only parts of you, filtered through my eyes. If Alison had expressed doubts, I would have shelved the project. But she told me to go ahead. There was nothing I could write, she said, that might make her ashamed.

  When I told Julian, fourteen at the time, he asked if Alison knew and then urged me to write this book because it might avert other deaths on rafting trips. He also said that men rarely write about such things. A few years later, before leaving for college, he handed me personal notes and high school papers about the accident and its aftermath. He told me to use them as I saw fit. I demurred: what if he decided to write his own story one day? “If I do,” Julian said, “it will be from a totally different place.”

  After all that happened, Alison and Julian trusted me to write this book. I may never fully convey how much this means.

  For their openness and insights about this book, I am grateful to Annie Boland and Harry Fogarty; Catherine Cusset; Gay Block, Josh Gilbert, Dan Greenberg, Billie Parker, and Marie-Eve Thérenty; Elyssa Ackerman, Bart Everly, Laurie Gerson, Francine Gerson, Mitch Horowitz, Kathy Karp, Norm Magnusson, John Siciliano, Laura van Straaten, and Frédéric Viguier. Other friends proved generous in the last stretch: Dan Ain, Abbe Aronson, Claudia Baez, Craig Balsam, Mario Batali, Susi Cahn, Martha Frankel, Paul Katz, Sydney Mimeles, Jonathan van Meter, and Andy Young.

  My agent, Steve Hanselman, and his wife, Julia Serebrinsky, championed Disaster Falls and immediately identified Rachel Klayman as the ideal editor. They were right. With empathy and intelligence and scrupulous attention to detail, Rachel help
ed me deepen the manuscript. Sometimes, she understood things before or even better than I did. Though I have published other books, I did not truly understand the craft of editing until I worked with Rachel. Meghan Houser also made profound contributions to the editorial process. Young but knowing, Meghan never let the nature of the material intimidate her. I am deeply indebted to both of them, as well as to Penny Simon, Danielle Crabtree, Jon Darga, and the entire team at Crown.

  Stéphane Gerson is a cultural historian and Professor of French Studies at New York University. He has won several awards, including the Jacques Barzun Prize in Cultural History and the Laurence Wylie Prize in French Cultural Studies. He lives in Manhattan and Woodstock, New York, with his family.

  What’s next on

  your reading list?

  Discover your next

  great read!

  *

  Get personalized book picks and up-to-date news about this author.

  Sign up now.