Stéphane Gerson - DISASTER FALLS

Start: 
Wednesday, February 22, 2017 - 7:00pm
Location: 
Congregation Beth Israel
5600 N Braeswood Blvd
Houston, TX 77096

Presented in partnership with the Crown Publishing Group and Congregation Beth Israel.

Disaster Falls: A Family Story By Stephane Gerson Cover Image
$26.00
ISBN: 9781101906699
Availability: Unlikely to Be Available
Published: Crown - January 24th, 2017

 
A haunting chronicle of what endures when the world we know is swept away
On a day like any other, on a rafting trip down Utah's Green River, Stephane Gerson's eight-year-old son, Owen, drowned in a spot known as Disaster Falls. That night, as darkness fell, Stephane huddled in a tent with his wife, Alison, and their older son, Julian, trying to understand what seemed inconceivable. It's just the three of us now, Alison said over the sounds of a light rain and, nearby, the rushing river. We cannot do it alone. We have to stick together.
Disaster Falls chronicles the aftermath of that day and their shared determination to stay true to Alison's resolution. At the heart of the book is an unflinching portrait of a marriage tested. Husband and wife grieve in radically different ways that threaten to isolate each of them in their post-Owen worlds. ( He feels so far, Stephane says when Alison shows him a selfie Owen had taken. He feels so close, she says.) With beautiful specificity, Stephane shows how they resist that isolation and reconfigure their marriage from within.
As Stephane navigates his grief, the memoir expands to explore how society reacts to the death of a child. He depicts the good death of his father, which reveals an altogther different perspective on mortality. He excavates the history of the Green River rife with hazards not mentioned in the rafting company's brochures. He explores how stories can both memorialize and obscure a person's life and how they can rescue us.
Disaster Falls is a powerful account of a life cleaved in two raw, truthful, and unexpectedly consoling.

 

About the Author

Stephane Gersonis a cultural historian and a professor of French studies at New York University. He has won several awards, including the Jacques Barzun Prize in Cultural History and the Laurence Wylie Prize in French Cultural Studies. He lives in Manhattan and Woodstock, New York, with his family.