This Is Chance! by Jon Mooallem

This Is Chance! by Jon Mooallem

The thrilling, cinematic story of a community shattered by disaster--and the extraordinary woman who helped pull it back together

An intimate, moving story about our capacity to care for one another when things fall apart--and, just maybe, on all the ordinary days, too.--Elizabeth Gilbert

In the spring of 1964, Anchorage, Alaska, was a modern-day frontier town yearning to be a metropolis--the largest, proudest city in a state that was still brand-new. But just before sundown on Good Friday, the community was jolted by the most powerful earthquake in American history, a catastrophic 9.2 on the Richter Scale. For four and a half minutes, the ground lurched and rolled. Streets cracked open and swallowed buildings whole. And once the shaking stopped, night fell and Anchorage went dark. The city was in disarray and sealed off from the outside world.

Slowly, people switched on their transistor radios and heard a familiar woman's voice explaining what had just happened and what to do next. Genie Chance was a part-time radio reporter and working mother who would play an unlikely role in the wake of the disaster, helping to put her fractured community back together. Her tireless broadcasts over the next three days would transform her into a legendary figure in Alaska and bring her fame worldwide--but only briefly. That Easter weekend in Anchorage, Genie and a cast of endearingly eccentric characters--from a mountaineering psychologist to the local community theater group staging Our Town--were thrown into a jumbled world they could not recognize. Together, they would make a home in it again.

Drawing on thousands of pages of unpublished documents, interviews with survivors, and original broadcast recordings, This Is Chance is the hopeful, gorgeously told story of a single catastrophic weekend and proof of our collective strength in a turbulent world.

There are moments when reality instantly changes--when the life we assume is stable gets upended by pure chance. This Is Chance is an electrifying and lavishly empathetic portrayal of one community rising above the randomness, a real-life fable of human connection withstanding chaos.

Jon Mooallem has been a contributing writer to The New York Times Magazine for many years and has been on several radio shows and magazines, including This American Life and Wired. The New York Times Book Review, The New Yorker, NPR's Science Friday, and Canada's National Post all named his first book, Wild Ones: A Sometimes Disturbing, Weirdly Reassuring Tale About Looking at People Looking at Animals in America, as a significant book of the year. He and his family live on Bainbridge Island, just outside of Seattle.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9780525509912
ISBN 10	0525509917
Title	This Is Chance!
Author	Jon Mooallem
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Hardback
Publisher	Random House USA Inc
Year published	2020-03-24
Number of pages	336
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.