This Is Chance!; The Great Alaska Earthquake, Genie Chance, and the Shattered City She Held Together by Jon Mooallem; Random House, 2021. 315 pages; $18.00 (paperback); reading level: adult/young adult.
Beginning with the epigram (a quote from Thornton Wilder’s play Our Town) and a “Cast of Characters” followed by Acts One, Two, and Three (instead of a table of contents and chapters) it’s clear that this is something more than the usual disaster tale. The title misleads by giving part-time news reporter Genie Chance star billing. Though we do learn a lot about Chance’s life and her near-continuous radio broadcast that guided her adopted city of Anchorage through the second most powerful earthquake ever measured, Mooallem reaches for something more ambitious: Channeling the Stage Manager in Wilder’s Our Town (the very play whose opening at a makeshift Anchorage theater is aborted by the quake) author Mooallem zooms from a granular account of people’s actions during the disaster to a grand sweep of their backstories and deaths years (or sometimes mere weeks) after the quake. The author seems to be asking whether his subjects’ lives are infinitely precious as they reach out in the moment to help one another survive or depressingly meaningless as time sweeps their individual stories into the collective dustbin of history. For all the meticulous details Mooallem provides about the quake and its aftermath (and there are many), it is the juxtaposition of Wilder’s play (in which firm concepts such as time and place become unstable) and the Great Alaska Earthquake (during which solid ground folds, crumbles, and slides) that provides the closest sense of what survivors of the disaster might have felt. The book is far from perfect – it often feels as if it can’t remember where it’s going – but it illuminates some key ideas that will resonate long after the last word is read.
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Connie Nordhielm Wooldridge, Author
Biography | View
- Just Fine They Way They Are (Calkins Creek, March 1, 2011)
- The Brave Escape of Edith Wharton (Clarion Books, 2010)
- Thank You Very Much, Captain Ericsson! (Holiday House, 2005; Berndtsdotter Books, 2012)
- When Esther Morris Headed West (Holiday House, 2001)
- The Legend of Strap Buckner (Holiday House, 2001)
- Wicked Jack (Holiday House, 1995)
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