Search - Alive: The Story of the Andes Survivors

The story of the Andes Survivors. Their place crashed high in th eAndes. Their only shelter was the plane's shattered fuselage, their only supplies a little wine and some bits of candy. In the beginning, there were thirty-two survivors. Then, only twenty-seven; then, nineteen....and, in the end, sixteen. This is their story--the greatest modern epic of catastrophe and human endurance.

In October of 1972, a chartered plane carrying 45 passengers and crew left Uruguay to travel to Chile. A majority of the passengers were made up of young men who were part of an amateur rugby team going to Chile for a game. Others included family and friends. Over the rugged Andes, the pilot made a fatal error, and the plane crashed into the side of a mountain, flinging parts of the tail section, fuselage, wing, rudder and even some passengers out over the desolate landscape. The survivors were, for the most part, very young men (average age around 23 years old). On average, they came from priviledged families. Most were devout Catholics. They enjoyed their cigarettes. They loved their mothers and girlfriends. They loved the game of rugby and were eager to experience a taste of the world outside their beloved Uruguay.

Over the next 70 days, the remaining survivors battled cold, avalanches, injury, fear and hunger. To survive, they prayed - alot. They devised plans for capturing water. They made forays into the vast white bleak landscape to search for supplies and a way out. They became makeshift doctors and surgeons and helped the wounded. They waited for rescue to come from the outside. And to fight off starvation, they ate their dead.

The story of the 16 remaining Andes survivors makes for riveting reading. The first time I read this book I was in my early 20s myself, and I remember the cannibalism being the overriding memory I took away from this book. Now I'm older, and it's not the cannibalism that captures my attention, but how these very young men kept their sanity, faith and courage in the face of unimaginable horrors. Of their cannibalism, they are unapologetic (which is as it should be). However, they didn't take what they did to survive lightly, and one of the survivors says it best:

"When one awakes in the morning amid the silence of the mountains and sees all around the snow-capped peaks--it is majestic, sensational, something frightening--one feels alone, alone, alone in the world but for the presence of God. For I can assure you that God is there. We all felt it, inside ourselves, and not because we were the kind of pious youths who are always praying all day long, even though we had a religious education. Not at all. But there one feels the presence of God. One feels, above all, what is called the hand of God, and allows oneself to be guided by it...And when the moment came when we did not have any more food, or anything of that kind, we thought to ourselves that if Jesus at His last supper had shared His flesh and blood with His apostles, then it was a sign to us that we should do the same--take the flesh and blood as an intimate communion between us all. It was this that helped us to survive, and now we do not want this--which was something intimate, intimate--to be hackneyed or touched or anything like that...."

Alive is much much more then a survival story. It is a glimpse of courage and faith in the midst of death, fear, and hopelessness.

Once I finally got into the book, this was a good story of survival. The men and women who crashed in the Andes had to overcome horrible situations -- injuries from the crash, an avalanche, and then the lack of food. What they did to survive was admirable, even if some may judge them harshly over their decision to eat the flesh of their dead friends.

That being said, though, the story moves so slowly, and the author's writing style is so staid, that it took me forever to actually feel like I was reading something worthwhile.

A good story, but it's a journey to plod through it.

The book was great. It was awful how those poor people had to eat others to survive and stuff

Haunting.

exciting book.