Click on a thumbnail to go to Google Books.
Loading... Alive : Sixteen Men, Seventy-two Days, and Insurmountable Odds--the Classic Adventure of Survival in the Andes (P.S.) (original 1974; edition 2005)by Piers Paul Read
Work InformationAlive: The Story of the Andes Survivors by Piers Paul Read (1974)
» 9 more Loading...
Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book. No current Talk conversations about this book. This is the gripping, dramatic, grim and thought-provoking account of a group of young Uruguayan rugby players and their family and friends stranded in the snow capped Andes after their plane crashed when the pilot misjudged his location and wrecked his aircraft one day in October 1972. A number of passengers and crew perished in the crash itself or died of their injuries shortly thereafter. Even so there were some 29 survivors at this point of the original 45 passengers and crew. The survivors had very little food to share among them while waiting to be rescued, and soon they faced the inevitability of death .....until they took the shocking but necessarily life-saving step of eating the bodies of their dead friends and fellow passengers and crew. The account of these events is very detailed and entirely matter of fact and unsensationalised. It would be easy to be appalled and disgusted by this, but without this recourse, there have been no eventual survivors at all. In the end, after the deaths of 8 in an avalanche, and a further few from a combination of injuries and malnutrition, 16 of the boys eventually made it, after two of them managed to find a way out of the barren area where they were stranded by scaling a mountain, and raised the alarm. This is a great and almost spiritual account of reportage, written only two years after the events from the accounts of the survivors. ( ) Not for the faint of heart Wow! What a heartbreaking tale. This was very graphic at times retelling what these young men had to do to survive. A very serious read. At times it was very confusing who the author was referencing because he would refer to them with first name, last name, sometimes even a nickname or combo all within the same pargraph. no reviews | add a review
Belongs to Publisher SeriesMeulenhoff editie (358) Has the adaptation
The #1 New York Times bestseller and the true story behind the film: A rugby team resorts to the unthinkable after a plane crash in the Andes. Spirits were high when the Fairchild F-227 took off from Mendoza, Argentina, and headed for Santiago, Chile. On board were forty-five people, including an amateur rugby team from Uruguay and their friends and family. The skies were clear that Friday, October 13, 1972, and at 3:30 p.m., the Fairchild's pilot reported their altitude at 15,000 feet. But one minute later, the Santiago control tower lost all contact with the aircraft. For eight days, Chileans, Uruguayans, and Argentinians searched for it, but snowfall in the Andes had been heavy, and the odds of locating any wreckage were slim. Ten weeks later, a Chilean peasant in a remote valley noticed two haggard men desperately gesticulating to him from across a river. He threw them a pen and paper, and the note they tossed back read: "I come from a plane that fell in the mountains . . ." Sixteen of the original forty-five passengers on the F-227 survived its horrific crash. In the remote glacial wilderness, they camped in the plane's fuselage, where they faced freezing temperatures, life-threatening injuries, an avalanche, and imminent starvation. As their meager food supplies ran out, and after they heard on a patched-together radio that the search parties had been called off, it seemed like all hope was lost. To save their own lives, these men and women not only had to keep their faith, they had to make an impossible decision: Should they eat the flesh of their dead friends? A remarkable story of endurance and determination, friendship and the human spirit, Alive is the dramatic bestselling account of one of the most harrowing quests for survival in modern times. No library descriptions found. |
Current DiscussionsNonePopular covers
Google Books — Loading... GenresMelvil Decimal System (DDC)982.6History and Geography South America ArgentinaLC ClassificationRatingAverage:
Is this you?Become a LibraryThing Author. |