There are moments when reality instantly changes-when the life we assume is stable gets upended by pure chance.

Together, they would make a home in it again.ĭrawing on thousands of pages of unpublished documents, interviews with survivors, and original broadcast recordings, This Is Chance!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. 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. 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. 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. Slowly, people switched on their transistor radios and heard a familiar woman’s voice explaining what had just happened and what to do next. The city was in disarray and sealed off from the outside world.

And once the shaking stopped, night fell and Anchorage went dark. Streets cracked open and swallowed buildings whole. For four and a half minutes, the ground lurched and rolled. 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. 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. “A beautifully wrought and profoundly joyful story of compassion and perseverance.”- BuzzFeed (Best Books of the Year) “A powerful, heart-wrenching book, as much art as it is journalism.”- The Wall Street Journal The thrilling, cinematic story of a community shattered by disaster-and the extraordinary woman who helped pull it back together

This Is Chance! by Jon Mooallem