Disaster Falls: A Family Story

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.