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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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