unquestionably my favorite kind of nonfiction is getting a full page of facts where each line is more batshit than the last. only The Orchid Thief has this beat so far.
"Like veteran bush pilots, career loggers can rattle off the names of dead and crippled comrades in numbers whose only comparison can be found among professional soldiers. One friend of Tingley's named Vaillancourt was scalped by a flying cable; another named Judd Mcmann got dragged through an edger--a machine used for squaring up the edges of rough boards. "Mighty" Joe Young broke his back when he was thrown from a skidder after losing control while hauling logs off a mountainside. Carl Larsen was hit so hard by a cable that the impact tore the aorta out of his heart; another Swede Tingley knew was killed when the tree he was felling kicked back, striking him from behind as he ran. Still another managed to make it safely back to Vancouver only to lose his life when he stepped out of a Granville Street bar and was shot through the head by a drunk firing at random from a block away. For years, Vancouver's News Herald maintained a loggers' death count box, just as the New York Times does for American soldiers during wartime."