Real useful book. I wouldn't say it provides any neat answers, but it's a great vehicle to stimulate your thinking about what kind of stuff can happen and why it might or might not be survivable. I would say that it's true that failures are inevitable, but one thing he illustrates is that there is the failure you can't avoid, but there is also the opportunity to fail that's also present in these activities. He's on a somewhat different tack than something like Diver Down, but the one thing that's really worth thinking about, because it's the thing you can do something about, is the fatal decision that is often driven by the same impulse that got you into the activity in the first place, the one that you would get right if it was on a written test but that you get wrong in action.
I don't think he really discovered what he set out to discover. He got some clues as to why some survive and others don't, but as you read, you're also trying to get a grip on his original question. Of course, if the risk was zero, people who do those activities folr kicks wouldn't do them. But it never hurts to be reminded that there's a huge difference between the pretend risk of riding a highly engineered but perfectly safe roller coaster and the genuine risk of an uncontrolled mountain, wilderness or underwater environment. And the one that's just waiting to kill you, like the nice afternoon winter hike down to the lake if you don't take the right clothes and it rains, often feels more tame than the thrill ride that's 100% safe. In the realm of actually risky activities, there's just no such thing as a mission that can be assumed to go right. It's failure that's routine. It happens all the time. If it doesn't this time, that's just a bonus and is best treated as an unusual event.
