Book Review || A Deadly Wandering: A Tale of Tragedy and Redemption in the Age of Attention

*Hello my fashionistas! This post is for my class, so just disregard this post. I'll delete it, once its graded!* xoxo!

A Deadly Wandering: A Tale of Tragedy and Redemption in the Age of Attention by Matt Richtel was  a book about a 19-year-old student, Reggie Shaw from Utah, who killed two scientists in a car accident while he was texting and driving. The car jumped the divider and hit another car that caused the accident. The driver had no idea what had happened, and his phone records had showed that he was texting at the time that the accident occurred. 

The whole book is a story that takes us through the incident, the whole process of his court process and his redemption.

Even though it was proven that he was indeed texting while driving, he received no time in jail and got community service, and was gave talks to the community about the dangers of texting and driving. 

Richtel did a great job with adding the perspectives of the victims families, the police investigators, and everyone that was helping Shaw advocate against texting and driving.  

Richtel argues that texting and driving could be just as dangerous as drunk driving. Let me give you a couple of statistics about drunk driving provided by textinganddrivingsafety.com and edgarsnyder.com

• In 2011, 23 percent of all auto collisions involved a cell phone that is 1 in every 4 car accidents.
• 5 seconds is the amount of time that your attention is taken away from the road when you are driving.
• Texting while driving makes an accident 23 more times likely to happen.
• 82 percent of Americans between the ages of 16 and 17 own a cell phone and 52 percent of them admitted to talking on the phone while driving. 32 percent say that they have texting while driving.
• Approx. 60,000 drivers attempt to use their cell phones while driving.
• You are 6 times more likely to be an accident while texting than while drunk.
• 11 teens die everyday as a result of texting while driving
• Teen drivers are 4 times more likely than adults to get into accidents or near crashes caused by the use of a cell phone.

I think this book was great because it opens a lot of eyes to people in this society to take texting and driving seriously. A lot of people think that they are immune to getting in an accident if they text and drive because they assume that they “know what they are doing,” but it could happen to anyone. Richtel shared a compelling story that we could all learn from, and he did a great job with breaking down everything to tell us a story about Reggie Shaw, and giving us realistic situation to learn from. 

Works Cited:

http://www.textinganddrivingsafety.com/texting-and-driving-stats/

https://www.edgarsnyder.com/car-accident/cause-of-accident/cell-phone/cell-phone-statistics.html