Williams, lying in the no man's land between the cone of the volcano and the outer rim of the caldera (a basin surrounding the cone) and fighting off shock, was rescued in large part because of the heroic efforts of two female colleagues, a Colombian who had studied with him in the States and an American. Tricky neurosurgery, reconstruction of his shattered leg, diminished mental functioning and grief at the loss of his colleagues followed Williams' hellish travails in the caldera. The eruption, as he and his co-writer, journalist Fen Montaigne, describe it in "Surviving Galeras," was a catastrophe that couldn't have been predicted or anticipated, just like the various other (and even more devastating) volcanic disasters he recounts in filling out the book's 270 pages.

That's Williams' story, and he's sticking to it, but science reporter and geologist Virginia Bruce isn't buying. Her emphatically subtitled "No Apparent Danger: The True Story of Volcanic Disaster at Galeras and Nevado Del Ruiz," argues that Williams is a grandstanding maverick who failed to enforce proper safety precautions during the trip to the crater and misrepresented himself as the sole survivor of the disaster in the media frenzy that followed the tragedy. Most damning, she contends, before leading his colleagues into the crater Williams had ignored evidence that suggested another eruption was on its way.

If all of this triggers a sensation of déjà vu, then you may have also followed the controversy attendant to Jon Krakauer's enormously successful "Into Thin Air," an account of the 1996 Everest disaster. Not long after Krakauer's book hit the bestseller lists, "The Climb," another firsthand description of the infamous climbing expedition that ended in the deaths of eight people, was published, this one by Anatoli Boukreev. Boukreev died shortly after his book came out, but his criticism of Krakauer's version of events was staunchly defended in the press by his coauthor, G. Weston DeWalt.

In the case of the Galeras tragedy, however, Bruce's debunking has arrived at the very same time as Williams' ostensibly authoritative account. However much this may irk the authors, in truth, the conflict between the two books makes each one more interesting than it would have been alone. That's because the Galeras disaster, however rivetingly it's described (the first-person version in Williams' book is a real nail-biter), doesn't by itself make for a book-length narrative; it simply happened too fast. The eruption lasted less than a half-hour, and the relatively smooth rescue operation only a couple of hours more. Unlike the Everest expedition, Galeras isn't the story of an isolated group of mismatched people battling the elements and their own weaknesses over a period of several days -- a setup, for all the world like an unorchestrated season of "Survivor," that makes Krakauer's book an irresistible blend of adventure yarn and soap opera.

Maya Angelou reads from "The Heart of a Woman"