The author claims to not have flashbacks, but his candid, vivid memories bring this nearly incredible story to life once...
Intense memoir of epic survival that both shocked and thrilled a worldwide audience.
Piers Paul Read’s Alive was an international bestseller based on the 1972 ordeal of Uruguayan survivors of a plane crash high in the Andes mountains. Now Parrado, one of the members of that Montevideo rugby club, who was instrumental in the story’s outcome, sets down his personal recollections for the first time. The bare facts remain gripping: In October, 45 passengers and crew, comprising the team, family members and fans departed Mendoza, Argentina, bound for Santiago, Chile, in a chartered twin-engine turboprop plane. The plane, traveling through turbulent mountain passes in lowering visibility, crashed into a peak and came to rest in a glacial snow field at an altitude of about 12,000 feet. There were 32 survivors, some terminally injured. Parrado’s harrowing account details the burial of his mother, dead on impact, and later his sister, who died of internal injuries; meanwhile, the group, without heavy clothing (some had never seen snow before) or any source of food, set about improvising for survival on the freezing mountain. They cared for injured teammates, watched others die and finally made the agonizing decision that the bodies were, indeed, their only potential source of food—hence the sensational reaction to the original story. After two months, Parrado, who sustained a skull fracture, and one companion were able to traverse some 70 miles of Andean terrain without any mountaineering equipment or know-how in order to contact rescuers in Chile, saving the remaining 16.
The author claims to not have flashbacks, but his candid, vivid memories bring this nearly incredible story to life once again.Pub Date: May 9, 2006
ISBN: 1-4000-9767-3
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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