This Is Chance!

December 1, 2019

In 1964, Alaska was a new state and ambitious to prove its worth. Anchorage was transitioning to becoming a sizable city, and was looking forward to its future when disaster struck in the form of a 9.2 earthquake on Good Friday, leading to destroyed infrastructure, impassable streets, and missing people. There was no modern disaster management. There was however, the radio; and an ambitious reporter, Genie Chance, who relayed message after message, helping to organize the initial recovery process. Mooallem (Wild Ones) chooses to focus exclusively on the people of Anchorage during the first three days after the earthquake. This is a story about how communities pulled together in the face of extreme adversity; while several people described throughout were also pivotal to the disaster relief and recovery process, Mooallem uses Genie Chance as the anchor and heart of the story. VERDICT A great crossover read for teens as well as adults about community, tenacity, and the power of one person to make a difference.--Laura Hiatt, Fort Collins, CO

Copyright 2019 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from December 1, 2019
A natural catastrophe inspires ordinary people to extraordinary heroism. Like the aftershocks of the earthquake that rocked Anchorage in 1964, this immersion in a barely remembered disaster shows how thematic implications continue to reverberate. In this impressively rendered narrative, longtime New York Times Magazine writer-at-large Mooallem (Wild Ones: A Sometimes Dismaying, Weirdly Reassuring Story About Looking at People Looking at Animals in America, 2013) seamlessly blends together a character study, an examination of the character of a community, a chronicle of what happened, and an inquiry into the human soul. The title refers not only to life's chanciness, but also to the protagonist, a part-time radio reporter named Genie Chance, who became the voice of calm reassurance to Anchorage and then earned fleeting fame as the voice of Alaska. The author ably describes the earthquake, the most powerful in North American history: "The earth yawned open and swallowed cars....The sounds of the earthquake were part of the dreamlike incoherence. Most people mistook the low growl of the churning earth for a nuclear bomb." Mostly, however, he focuses on the people and the aftermath, specifically how the disaster brought out the best in people, who followed their best instincts when there was no clear line of authority and behaved with "a staggering amount of collaboration and compassion." Initially, skeptical readers might question the account: How did an author born long after the incident learn so much that he is able to recount so precisely. Why does he frame the events in reference to Our Town (playing at the community theater at the time), dividing the narrative into acts, bringing different characters onstage and then off? It isn't until Mooallem introduces himself as a character and recounts the process of reporting that one fully appreciates the journalistic accomplishment, the implications of which extend from feminist activism to the field of "disaster studies." Encouragingly, the major lesson is that "our goodness is ordinary." One finishes this book deeply impressed--with the people of Anchorage, with Genie Chance, and with the author.

COPYRIGHT(2019) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

January 13, 2020
Journalist Mooallem (Wild Ones) vividly dramatizes the impact of the 9.2-magnitude Great Alaska Earthquake on the residents of Anchorage in this poignant chronicle. Striking “just before sundown” on March 27, 1964, the earthquake shut down the electrical grid and sent “four-foot-high ground waves” rolling through city streets. Mooallem centers his narrative on local reporter Genie Chance, who was running an errand with her 13-year-old son when the earthquake hit. After dropping him at home with her husband and two younger children, Chance headed to the collapsed J.C. Penney department store downtown to photograph the damage. As soon as her radio station returned to the air, she began broadcasting from the mobile unit in her car, sharing reports from civic leaders, issuing a tsunami warning, and reassuring her listeners “that the world had not come to an end.” She later estimated that she talked for 30 hours straight, and Mooallem credits her and numerous other municipal officials and civilian volunteers with keeping the “modern-day frontier town” from descending into chaos. Interweaving accounts of search-and-rescue operations with the story of a local production of Our Town staged the weekend after the earthquake, Mooallem delivers a moving tribute to the spirit of community in the face of disaster. This inspiring tale feels bound for the big-screen. Agent: Jin Auh, the Wylie Agency.