Alive: The Story of the Andes Survivors
Written by Piers Paul Read
Narrated by Paul Ansdell
4.5/5
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Currently unavailable
Currently unavailable
About this audiobook
October 12, 1972:
A plane carrying a team of young rugby players crashed into the remote, snow-peaked Andes. Out of the 45 original passengers and crew, only 16 made it off the mountain alive. For 10 excruciating weeks, they suffered deprivations beyond imagining, confronting nature head-on at its most furious and inhospitable. And to survive, these men and women not only had to keep their faith; they had to make an impossible decision: Should they eat the flesh of their dead friends?
A remarkable story of endurance and determination, Alive is the dramatic best-selling account of one of the most harrowing quests for survival in modern times.
©2002 Piers Paul Read (P)2017 Dreamscape Media, LLC
Piers Paul Read
Piers Paul Read, third son of poet and art critic Sir Herbert Read, was born in 1941, raised in North Yorkshire, and educated by Benedictine monks at Ampleforth College. After studying history at Cambridge University, he spent two years in Germany, and on his return to London, worked as a subeditor on the Times Literary Supplement. His first novel, Game in Heaven with Tussy Marx, was published in 1966. His fiction has won the Hawthornden Prize, the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize, the Somerset Maugham Award, and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize. Two of his novels, A Married Man and The Free Frenchman, have been adapted for television and a third, Monk Dawson, as a feature film. In 1974, Read wrote his first work of reportage, Alive: The Story of the Andes Survivors, which has since sold five million copies worldwide. A film of Alive was released in 1993, directed by Frank Marshall and starring Ethan Hawke. His other works of nonfiction include Ablaze, an account of the nuclear accident at Chernobyl; The Templars, a history of the crusading military order; Alec Guinness: The Authorised Biography, and The Dreyfus Affair. Read is a fellow and member of the Council of the Royal Society of Literature and a member of the Council of the Society of Authors. He lives in London.
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Reviews for Alive
44 ratings3 reviews
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Quite lengthy for the content but an interesting read nonetheless. The narrator for the audiobook has a nice voice. I think it's a bit graphic for some, and it's not super action packed, so better probably to do the audiobook while multitasking. If I read the hard copy, I probably wouldn't have finished just given the lags and the length. Overall I love memoirs and this is a unique historical event I'm glad I learned about.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5This is an accurate and unbiased version of a true story. It does not shy away from the gruesome facts of not only the resorted cannibalism but of the intricacies of the social aspects of isolation. The author provides details beyond their survival and rescue, as the passengers retun to a civilization that was not prepared to deal with the reality of their survival beyond a miracle.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Definitely worth listening , although the first and last two hours or so are rather tedious. Sensitive listeners should be warned that the description of the appalling conditions in which the boys survived doesn't leave much to the imagination...
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