Alive | Piers Paul Read | Highly Recommended!!

Alive | Piers Paul Read | Superb Narrative of Survival

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Alive

	Alive Piers Paul Read Harper Perennial, 2005 - 398 pages average customer review:based on 185 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Highly Recommended!!

This book is so well written that you will feel like you were there and suffered with them. After reading this book I felt like I had a new appreciation for life. I highly recommend this book.

Superb Narrative of Survival

As a kid in 1972 I heard on the radio that survivors from a plane crash in South America had walked out of the mountains weeks after being given up for dead. This superbly readable narrative tells their story. Thirty two of the 45 rugby players and other passengers survived the hard landing in the deep snow (some with injuries). Now they were trapped high in the remote and frigid Andes Mountains with almost no provisions. No rescue planes appeared overhead - all search flights scoured the wrong area due to faulty navigational readings the pilot (who was off course) radioed in before the crash. Shivering in their new home (the plane's fuselage), each person knew they'd need extraordinary effort and some luck to survive what became a ten-week ordeal of damp, cold and death. The author shows how the group developed several life-saving innovations. We also see the devastating choice they faced when their rationed food ran out; either cannibalize their dead comrades or die of starvation. Later, in near desperation, they sent their fittest members up the icy slope of a nearby peak. Perhaps the two could somehow ascend safely without proper equipment, and then find a way out from their frozen death trap.

Author Pier Paul Read makes readers feel like they're sitting alongside the survivors high in the frozen Andes. This is not a happy story - too many perished from injuries and harsh conditions. Still, this is an utterly fascinating narrative (and later a 1993 film) about determination and the will to survive.

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I GET BY WITH A LITTLE HELP FROM MY FRIENDS...

Time has not diminished the drama of the tale of the Uruguayan rugby team whose plane crashed in the Andes Mountains. Of the forty five people on the plane at the time of the crash, sixteen came down from the mountain about seventy days later with a saga of survival not easily forgotten.

Theirs is a journey born of tragedy and human endurance. The author unfolds a tale that is gripping in the telling, as enthralling as it is almost unbelievable. It is investigative reporting at its best, because it does not fail to convey the human drama and pathos behind the story of this remarkable struggle for survival high up in the Andes Mountains. Masterfully written, it is a well balanced narrative that takes great pains to ground the experience of the survivors in the context out of which it arose.

The plane had crashed in the Andes Mountains on Argentinian territory. It was an exercise in terror for those on the plane, as it barreled down the mountain, before finally coming to rest in a valley of snow high up in the Andes. Of the forty five persons on board, thirty two had initially survived the crash. Some, however, had sustained serious injuries. Time would not be their friend. Moreover, with little warm clothing (keep in mind that October is springtime in South America), the survivors were exposed to the extreme cold of the night air, high up in the Andes. Though spring, this still meant temperatures well below freezing. Damp, cold, and hungry, amid the anguished cries of the injured, thus began the first of many such nights.

By their tenth day in the Andes, the limited food supplies, which they had rationed with all the care of a miser, had virtually run out. Starving and ravenously hungry, they voiced what they all knew to be true, but had not dared to voice before. They must eat, or they would die. The only thing left for them to eat, however, was abhorrent and deeply repugnant to them. Digging deep into their conservative, religious souls, they found a way to justify actions that would have them transcend a new reality. Their fallen comrades would now provide the means of their sustenance. All eventually succumbed to this only means of survival.

This, while one of the most dramatic parts of their story, is just that, a part. Their survival entailed much more. They had to endure other deprivations. They had to survive the elements. They had to overcome a profound despair over being seemingly forgotten by the outside world. Ultimately, only sixteen were able to do so. How they did so will fascinate all readers of adventure literature. The means that they took to let the world know that they were still alive will astound even the most jaded of readers. It is an account of human endurance that is thought provoking and compelling, a quest to reconcile physical needs with the spiritual. It is, above all, a riveting testament to life.

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I GET BY WITH A LITTLE HELP FROM MY FRIENDS...

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