Alive: The True Story of the Andes Survivors - Piers Paul Read

Advantages: A detailed account of survival that doesn't lapse into sentimentality
Disadvantages: Graphic descriptions of, um, bowel movements

I wasn't alive in 1972, so there was never a movement when I discovered that 16 survivors had been found from a plane crash 10 weeks earlier in one of the harshest territories on Earth. Instead, I've just heard scraps about the Fairchild, a chartered flight from the Uruguayan air force carrying a rugby team and a few others - 45 in total - crashing in the Andes while on their way to Chile and the survivors being forced to eat the dead in order to ...
...must have been - or how miraculous the escape of the remaining 16 was. My expectations were a little subdued when I read that the book had won a Thomas More Medal for its contribution to Catholic literature and that some of the survivors felt that "the faith and friendship which inspired them in the cordillera do not emerge from these pages". Read's introduction also makes it clear that this is no work of fiction: he did consider 'embellishing' ... Read review