Disaster Falls

November 14, 2016
In this wrenching memoir, Gerson, a historian and professor at New York University, grapples with unthinkable loss. He and his eight-year old son, Owen, were on a family rafting trip to Utah when father and son were thrown out of a small “duck boat” while navigating rapids on the Green River; Owen drowned. As he tries to find relief without dimming memory, Gerson turns to support groups, new routines, literature, history, and mysticism. Only with the death of his father two years later, and his wife’s unexpected pregnancy, does Gerson begin to achieve a tentative acceptance of the unacceptable. Gerson writes honestly of his grief and guilt with an analytic distance that doesn’t mask his suffering. Chapters narrating the events around Owen’s death provide a counterpoint to those examining the accident’s effects on Gerson’s marriage, family, community, and his own sense of identity. The experience of 9/11 and a visit with his father to Belarus—where family members were murdered in the Holocaust—allow Gerson to contextualize his personal tragedy within the overwhelming history of human catastrophe. While asserting that one can never recover from the death of a child, Gerson evocatively describes the process of a struggle that allows him to continue living.

November 15, 2016
How the author and his family overcame the loss of a child.When his 8-year-old son Owen accidentally drowned on a family rafting trip, Gerson (French Studies/New York Univ.), his wife, Alison, and remaining son, Julian, were as shocked as they were grief-stricken. Owen's death, writes the author, was "at once a ripple in the flow of everyday life and a disruption of the entire universe." Desperate to understand his loss, Gerson went deep inside himself and began to write while Alison externalized her grief through exercise. As he imagined Owen growing up and old, the author obsessively revisited the day of Owen's death and the hours that preceded it, carefully skirting around the actual incident itself. The strain of his son's death eventually caused Gerson to develop a rash and then other symptoms of physical breakdown, including bowel irritation, a hernia, prostatitis, and tinnitus. The loss affected Gerson's relationship to Alison as well as the relationships each had to their respective parents. Needing comfort, it was as though they had "bec[o]me children again." Yet it also brought Gerson closer to his own history as the son of an American-born Jewish man whose own family escaped the Holocaust. A trip to Belarus with his father, Berl, and son made Gerson realize that "those who had failed to save loved ones did not necessarily live in shame or guilt." This epiphany helped him to not only look directly at Owen's death, but also see that he was not to blame for it. Berl's own "good death" not long afterward released Gerson from his past, which allowed him to share the words he had penned about Owen with Alison and relive the civil lawsuit that followed the tragedy. Keenly observed and deeply felt, this book is not only a powerful reflection on grief and loss, but also an intimately textured history of fathers and sons. An unflinchingly honest, moving memoir of loss and recovery.

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Starred review from February 15, 2017

This diamond-sharp book is both meticulous and breathtaking. With methodical pacing and painstaking detail, the author describes how his eight-year-old son Owen died in a rafting accident on Utah's Green River, at a place called Disaster Falls. It is evident that Gerson is driven by a desire to get it right, to tell the full story of the accident, including its aftermath and preceding events. And while he takes us to the precipice of the fatality, it's as if the accident is secondary to the larger story. This creates a narrative tension in the passage about the incident itself. Though we know the outcome, we hold our breath as he and Owen approach the falls in a raft: we hope that it will end differently. Gerson also connects these events to the loss of his father in the year after his son's death, and in this way offers a meditation on the connection between fathers and sons. VERDICT A beautiful book, even as it deals with unthinkable anguish. (Memoir, 10/17/16; ow.ly/5jnF308ccrE)--Rachael Dreyer, Eberly Family Special Collections Lib, . Pennsylvania State Univ.

Copyright 2017 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

November 15, 2016
Cultural historian Gerson could likely take on no greater challenge than to chronicle the cycle of grief that followed the tragic death of Owen, his and wife Alison's 8-year-old son, in 2008. Hands down, there is likely nothing that can so jarringly alter the culture within a family than the death of a child. It came at the pinnacle of an exhilarating family vacation rafting down Utah's Green River. At a section of particularly treacherous rapids, referred to as Disaster Falls, little Owen somehow either fell or was thrown from the raft. Rescue efforts failed. Gerson and Alison vowed that no matter what happened, they would not succumb to anger, as much for their sake as for the sake of their other son, 11-year-old Julian. They both knew the dangers of marital strife following the death of a child and strove against overwhelming emotional odds to hang on to each other. No tragedy occurs in a vacuum, and Gerson rounds out their story with his personal history, which includes the difficult relationship with and death of his father.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2016, American Library Association.)