Jon Mooallem

The Good Friday, 1964, Anchorage, Alaska earthquake, and newscaster Genie Chance remaining on-air to broadcast events.

The Shaking of an All-American City, a Voice that Held it Together

This is Chance!

Andrew Reeves

Michael Knepprath

I was deeply concerned about halfway through when the subtext became text, and am glad that my concerns were mostly unwarranted - this book is lovingly crafted and very clever.

altlovesbooks

"Information is a form of comfort."

For anyone who has lived through a major disaster of any sort, this is a great read. Even if you haven't been through an earthquake specifically, there's enough parallels for what comes immediately after that you'll find a lot to identify with. This book opens with an innocuous town event held a month before the earthquake hit. You meet a lot of the main players early on, and are provided with a thoughtful introduction for each by the author. While ultimately an informative piece about one of the worst earthquakes ever, the story is presented in such a way that you feel like you're there with the characters in the room or on the road which made it an engaging read. Even the one-off people who play an important but short-lived role are given short "where are they now" summaries outlining highlights of their life after the earthquake, which I appreciated. Highly recommend giving this book a Chance (ha) when it comes out.

Disclaimer: I received a free ARC of this book through Goodreads Giveaways.

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.

The Shaking of an All-American City, A Voice That Held It Together

This Is Chance!

I.m. ruzz

I enjoyed it. I don't want to write a huge review so just take my four stars as proof it was good. I will say, when the author slipped into talking about himself in the third person about halfway through the book it was super off-putting and didn't become less so whenever he came back into the story. I really wonder what the editors were thinking having him describe himself in the third person, describe his own actions. Very strange, but a small small portion of an otherwise really interesting book.

This is Chance! The Shaking of an All-American City, a Voice that Held it Together

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