Customer Reviews

Blind Descent: The Quest to Discover the Deepest Place on Earth

5 star:		(38)
4 star:		(29)
3 star:		(21)
2 star:		(8)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

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.)

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.

`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.

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!

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)

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.