The Tsunami Book recounts a few moments of terror that few in this life ever experience. Lani's ability to distill the actual experiences of individuals, families and villages is remarkable. Personally, my mental state can only absorb a few of them at a sitting. It has taken me much longer to read the book than I originally thought it would. I soon found that the reality of the disaster soon became very personal. Lani's descriptions created mental images of persons and places I know in a very general sense. But they soon became even more familiar as she takes us through the devastation, the anxiety and apprehension and the multiple routes of escape - and even through the agony of the tragic losses suffered.
I find little to critique in the vivid details of an experience of a lifetime. The value of the book is that it reconstructs those terrible events in a meaningful way for those who actually lived it. For those of us who were not there - it creates for us a realistic recap that stays in our minds as if we had been there.
- James Winegar, RLS Foundation
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