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Title: Alive: The Story of the Andes Survivors by Piers Paul Read ISBN: 1-885283-08-3 Publisher: Adventure Library Pub. Date: June, 1996 Format: Hardcover List Price(USD): $40.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.56 (16 reviews)
Rating: 4
Summary: Frightening, but thought-provoking story of survival.
Comment: While the movie adaptation of Alive depicts the major events of the ordeal fairly comprehensively, only the book contains the complete account. Piers Paul Read's book is very complete and detailed, more fully describing the daily sufferings and routines of the survivors. In particular, emotional stresses, individual personalities, and the grisly task of obtaining flesh are related in depth.
It is frightening to consider how easily we can be thrust into a situation as horrifying as that the Uruguayan travellers in this book had to endure, but their story should not be avoided because it is upsetting. There is much to be learned from this account: the value of resourcefulness, of ability to do the agonizingly difficult, and of courage in frightening circumstances. Furthermore, to recognize how nearly hopeless a situation can be, and what extraordinary effort is needed to escape it helps us recalibrate our perceptions of difficulty, misery and pain to more accurate levels.
Though the survivors requested and evaluated this book, it is completely frank. Read gives an honest description of each survivor, including personality failings which made some survivors a further hardship to the rest. The growing despondency and physical withering of the survivors is told with harsh vividness. Describing how dead bodies were utilized was surely the most difficult task, but Read writes of this area with as much detail as any other. Corpses were not only stripped of muscle, but also internal organs, then bone marrow, then the skulls cracked for the brain within, as corpses available for food became scarce, ocasionally requiring that the grisly, partially eaten bodies be exhumed. In addition to the ordeal on the mountain, also included are: a brief description of the emotional outcomes of the experience; the media bombardment; the personal search conducted by parents for the crash site. Maps are included to place the story, but these are not scaled.
This account does leave one disturbed. The truth of our defenselessness but for the blanket of civilization is a valuable lesson that can only be shocked into our conditioned minds, however. There is a place in everyone's reading for such material, and furthermore, this incredible story takes only two or three days to read.
Rating: 4
Summary: Alive: Survival in the Andes
Comment: The book Alive survival in the Andes by Piers Paul Read was a very action pact book and was very well written. This story is about a rugby team and how they are on a flight over the mountain and the plane hits a couple of air pockets and ends up hitting one of it's wings on the side of the mountain. I would recommend this book to anyone who likes actions books or a good nonfiction story. The book did start off a little slow but picks right up. The more I read the less I wanted to put the book down. I hate to read and I loved reading this book. The book was interesting and detailed about what the people did while they where stuck on the mountain. I read this book for my World Lit. and Comp. English class and found it very easy to read. This book also taught me that given a bad situation you have to do whatever you can to survive because at that point in time, your survival is the most important thing. I also have much respect for these people and what they went through. The book helped me realized just how cold and how difficult it would be to survive up there even if your plane didn't go down, and you were just a mountain climber. I will tell all my friends about the book and would recommend it to anyone who is a reader because I think that it is such a well written book anyone would love it.
Rating: 5
Summary: incredible true story that is well written
Comment: The 1993 movie Alive was shown over the weekend on TV, I decided to finally borrow this 1974 book from the library, and finished it quickly, I couldn't put it down. The novel is a well written account of the survival of 16 Uruguayan boys from a plane crash in the Andes in October, 1972. The author didn't dramatize or sensationalize the despair of the group and the bravery of some (it was unnecessary), instead it comes across as an objective account of the people involved in the plane crash. I enjoyed the parts about Uruguayan culture -- how family and religion are predominant, how their parents (the fathers organizing more searches and mothers seeking clairvoyants and religious miracles) were involved in the rescue long after the governments of Chile and Uruguay had given up. The movie did not show this side of the story at all.
The boys themselves had their own sort of society in that valley in the Andes -- not everyone was helpful or had the instinct for survival and all of them had never been through this kind of hardship, but they made it work and their system kept 16 of them alive for 72 days. They had their share of so much bad luck (not knowing where they were, the expeditionaries took a longer/harder route to civilization; their parents had the right idea of their location a few times but looked elsewhere) and some good luck (they did not lose a single boy in their many expeditions). What got them through was a mixture of hope, love for their families, inventiveness and extreme stubborness -- all of which are admirable qualities and make their story worth telling.
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Title: Sailing Alone Around the World (Penguin Classics) by Joshua Slocum, Thomas Fogarty, George Varian, Thomas Philbrick, Tom Philbin ISBN: 0140437363 Publisher: Penguin USA (Paper) Pub. Date: June, 1999 List Price(USD): $9.00 |
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Title: We Die Alone: A WWII Epic of Escape and Endurance by David Howarth, Stephen E. Ambrose ISBN: 1558219730 Publisher: The Lyons Press Pub. Date: 01 August, 1999 List Price(USD): $14.95 |
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Title: Touching the Void: The True Story of One Man's Miraculous Survival by Joe Simpson ISBN: 0060730552 Publisher: Perennial Pub. Date: January, 2004 List Price(USD): $12.95 |
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