Books: Miracle in the Andes and Alive

When I was in high school, I watched the movie Alive in one of my lit classes. It was one of a few movies that managed to make an impression on me in spite of being shown in school. The story was gruesome and painful, but absolutely fascinating. I went on to read the book Alive by Piers Paul Read, which was different from the movie but equally impacting.

For those of you who don't have the slightest idea what I'm talking about, Alive is the true story (at least the book is...if I remember correctly, the movie is based on the story but takes some creative liberties) of a rugby team whose plane crashed in the Andes mountains in the middle of winter. They were far off course and deep in a treacherous area of the mountains, and searchers weren't able to find them. This group stayed alive for 72 days, before two of them finally walked out of the mountains (I believe it's the second highest mountain range on Earth) to get help. This survival was impressive enough, before adding in the details that the plane was broken in half, many of the survivors were very injured, they were completely mislead about their own position in the mountains and (the gruesome part) they ran out of normal food a week or so after they crashed. (I'll leave that jump in logic to you, and just say that they broke a very, very big taboo.) The story had incredible potential to be sensationalist, horrific and gross; instead, it was handled in a way that can't help but amaze you in the people's incredible will to survive.

Because this story made an impact on me years ago, I was pretty much stopped in my tracks when I was wandering through the library and saw a book about the Andes by Nando Parrado. Nando was the main protagonist of Alive, the young man whose skull was cracked open in the crash, whose mother and sister died beside him, and who eventually led the trek out of the mountains. I picked up Miracle in the Andes and read the whole book yesterday. It had most of the great elements that I remembered from Alive, with the benefit of being narrated first person by someone who had been on the mountain, rather than a journalist. I'm not sure I would love the book if I hadn't already read Alive and been pulled into the story--I really don't know. As it was, though, it was a great continuation of the story for me. It was extremely difficult to put down and if you have a reasonably strong stomach, I would highly recommend it. It's the sort of story that makes you slow down and appreciate how good your life is. When I read both Alive and Miracle in the Andes, I was surprisingly humbled. It's hard to be upset about the little things in life when you're faced with a story of people who had such a horrible experience and still fought so hard to live.