I would always like to be near craters, drunk with fire, gas, my face burned by the heat.  It's not
    that I flirt with my death, but at this point I don't care about it, because there is the pleasure of
    approaching the beast and not knowing what is going to catch you.
           -Katia Krafft, volcanologist

    The main body of the pyroclastic flow hugged the Mizunashi, but a glowing ash cloud--reaching
    840 degrees F--engulfed Maurice, Katia, Harry and the nearby journalists and drivers.  The Kraffts,
    Glicken, and many of the journalists were killed in seconds, their lungs scorched and robbed of air
    by plugs of ash and mucous, their bodies flash-burned by the heat.
           -Stanley Williams and Fen Montaigne, Surviving Galeras

It's easy enough to see why this book set off a bidding war among publishers anxious to print what seems sure to be a bestseller.  Stanley Williams is a volcanologist who in 1993 was nearly killed in an eruption on the slopes of the active volcano Galeras in Colombia, an event which did kill several of his fellow geologists and a few local sightseers.  As Williams lay on the ground, one leg nearly severed and his skull fractured after being pelted by flying rubble, two female colleagues led the effort to rescue him.  In addition to telling the story of his near death and rehabilitation, offers a fairly thorough look at the natural history of volcanoes, the history of volcanology, and the state of the science.  Williams also warns of the potentially devastating impact that a major eruption might have, particularly because population pressures have moved large numbers of people into ever closer proximity to active volcanoes.    It's a blend of rousing adventure and popular science that has become familiar in such books as The Perfect Storm, Longitude, Into Thin Air, Ship of Gold in the Deep Blue Sea, The Last River, and many other recent books.

Surviving Galeras is at least as good as most of these rivals, in fact, the volcanology is interesting enough to make it worthwhile reading even without the obligatory "tragedy."  I'm of the opinion that by now these self inflicted tragedies have worn themselves fairly thin.  Stanley Williams estimates that there about 300 serious volcanologists in the world and in the past twenty one years (1979 to 2000) twenty three have been killed by volcanic activity.  I've nothing like the background necessary to criticize the methods used by Williams and others, but of this I am certain, you could get most of the measurements that they are getting by walking around these craters if you used passive instrumentation or some kind of remote controlled devices.  This is after all the approach used on the Moon and Mars and elsewhere.  From what I gather, all they are really doing up there is measuring seismic activity, gravitational and magnetic forces, and the chemical composition of gas releases.  It simply doesn't seem imperative that a geologist be squatting there with a vapor hood capturing fumes when a remote control car (obviously you'd have to do some reengineering on it; I'm aware that you couldn't just use one you picked up in the toy section at K-Mart) could do the job equally well and much more safely.

Instead, the strong suggestion given off by this book is that it is a matter of machismo and lifestyle for volcanologists to do their work on site.  Thus, Williams says :

    There are geologists, and then there are volcanologists.  Only a few hundred scientists work on
    active volcanoes worldwide, and we share a strong esprit de corps.  Within this community there
    are those who study dead volcanoes and those who climb on living volcanoes.  My colleagues
    who've never set foot on an active volcano have made great contributions, but the best work, I
    believe, comes from those of us who walk into the crater.

Well, I suppose that could be true, but I bet there are perfectly competent geologists, who never leave the lab, who could just look at the measurements that are gathered from these sites and produce equally useful theories about what's going on.  The real point of being a volcanologist seems to be entangled as much with the great field trips and the bravado of the work as with the underlying science.  And that's fine, but it does take some of the edge off of the tragedy to realize that in a genuine sense it need not have happened, absent the scientists search for thrills.

This is a book to be enjoyed much more for the quite fascinating science and scientific history it contains than for the by now routine adventure tale, which is sure to be its major selling point on the book promotion circuit.  As these stories pile on top of each other, and on top of us poor readers, I find myself losing patience with the folks who take these risks.  Stanley Williams has a really interesting story to tell--and with the help of coauthor Fen Montaigne he tells it very well--but it's the story of volcanoes themselves, much more than it is the story of how he nearly got himself killed on the side of one.

(Reviewed:28-Mar-01)

Grade: (B-) Orrin C. Judd

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