Thrilling, uplifting, heartbreaking...I just couldn't put this down. So much more heart and emotion than the Alive book (which was good but more sterile). I cannot get over this story.

A story not about perseverance or survival, as much as it is about love and connectedness to others through shared human emotion. A lesson for us all during these trying times to not forget that we are all fundamentally tied together as humans and we must lay aside all trivialities to endure.

This took me much too long to read and not through boredom at ALL. I just picked the wrong times to settle down and read it.

What a phenomenal book. I don't think I can find the words to justify it. Only just to tell you to read it - and come away with a really life affirming message at the end of it.

I don't generally go for biographies and I like autobiographies even less, and I'd say memoirs are lowest on my list of genres of interest. That's not to say they're horrible, just not really for me. Having just finished Alive, i figured i'd give this one a try. It helped me remember why I prefer for a writer to gather the real story from multiple sources, rather than hearing it from just the one personal source. The person involved never has as much objectivity as an un-associated author.

The book is totally fine, just not really up my alley. It tells some details about the crash and survival, though in far less depth than Alive does, as it is the compiled stories of all the survivors, where this is just the one. In addition, this book was written long after the events, and I have a feeling had a LOT of memory revision...

TBH Nando annoyed me. Had I not read the other book, I doubt I would have been quite so annoyed, but reading his memory of things after the much less biased telling in Alive, made me think less of him. He was overly floral and positive about most of the events in the book, which I get was written LONG after the events, and things are often remembered differently when looking back, but I didn't love the tone. In addition, I am sure after 30 years of having to deal with and process what was an unbelievably terrible event, one can make things have more meaning than they really did, and that's all fine, but I don't particularly like reading that sort of thing.

One thing he said really stuck out to me. He talked about, after coming home, how he went through a party phase, likely as a way to enjoy life that he thought he wasn't going to get to keep. But he also wondered about why he had survived and his mother and sister hadn't, if he hadn't invited them, that they would be alive, how if he had missed the flight, like some others had, he would have been spared this ordeal, if his friend had sat in a different seat, he wouldn't have been killed in the crash, and what he could have done to change any of these things, what he could have done to stop them from happening. These are, ofc, totally normal thoughts to have. In addition, during his party phase, he had a breakdown in a club where he used to go with his now dead best friend and couldn't stop crying, something that hadn't happened to him before, but that is also a totally normal response to what he'd been through. However, not long after these passages, he talked about how, when people spoke to him about the crash and aftermath, they were surprised that he reported never having experienced survivors' guilt or post traumatic stress etc. I too was surprised to read this as he had just described himself having survivors' guilt and post traumatic stress response. So basically, either because of his ego, or as a defense/protective mechanism, he never acknowledged (at least publicly), the mental health issues he had because of the crash and aftermath. The way he wrote about always finding the positive and deciding to be happy etc, felt very self aggrandizing as well as just kind of painting over the bad shit with pretty colors. I DO believe you can decide to be happy, and that's a good way of dealing with SOME hardships and mental health issues, but that is not the solution for everyone or everything, the way he writes it. He sets himself apart from the other survivors several times in this way, and I wonder what they thought about it. Perhaps this was his coping mechanism and perhaps it worked for him. He rejected offers and plees for him to speak with a therapist after the event, which, after such a thing, feels more like trying not to deal with it rather than not needing to deal with it. That's my totally amateur take on the whole thing anyways.

I did appreciate his honesty when he spoke about how religion had affected him and changed in him. He seemed pretty clear headed in his evaluation of his feelings on that subject. He spoke only a little about the other survivors, and I wished for a little more of that. He was extremely cruel to a few of the boys, though I don't blame him for any of that given the circumstances, but his telling of those times were still very self centered (I don't like memoirs). I did appreciate his descriptions of Canessa though, as he was described as being pretty pushy in Alive. Parrado ended up describing his more forceful traits as important for their survival, and his telling of their final trek together didn't emphasize how much Canessa struggled as Alive had. In those ways, it was interesting to read his spin on things, 30 years after, while always remembering that it was spin.

I was not particularly moved by his telling, nor did I connect with him as a person. This book felt less honest than Alive to me.
I would say if you're interested in the straightforward events, read Alive. If you're interested in one survivor's personal experience, and how he interprets his own actions through a not particularly critical lens, read this one.

Audiobook. Written really well I thought. I really appreciate Nando sharing his mental process through it all. This was both fascinating and really immersed you in the story. The writing really kept my attention despite me already knowing major plot points. Truly a miracle.

“I looked down the mountain to the crash site. From this altitude it was just a ragged smudge on the pristine snow. I saw how crass and out of place it seemed, how fundamentally wrong. Everything about us was wrong here—the violence and racket of our arrival, our garish suffering, the noise and mess of our lurid struggle to survive. None of it fit here. Life did not fit here. It was all a violation of the perfect serenity that had reigned here for millions of years. I had sensed it the first time I gazed at this place: we had upset an ancient balance, and balance would have to be restored. It was all around me, in the silence, in the cold. Something wanted all that perfect silence back again; something in the mountain wanted us to be still.”

Several months ago I read Alive: The Story of the Andes Survivors by Piers Paul Read, a detailed account of the story of the sixteen survivors of Uruguayan Air Force Flight 571. It was informative and holistic but favored the presentation of fact over emotional drive, and that’s what makes Miracle In The Andes worth reading if you’ve already read Alive. Living this harrowing tale of sorrow, horror, cannibalism, perseverance, and human grit through the eyes of Nando Parrado is its own experience.

One of the many key insights that stuck out to me was Nando Parrado’s ruminations in the years that followed his time in the Andes. “I had been thinking of the disaster as a horrible mistake, as an unscripted deviation from the happy story of the life I had been promised. But now I began to understand that my ordeal in the Andes was not an interruption of my true destiny, or a perversion of what my life was supposed to be. It simply was my life, and the future that lay ahead was the only future available to me.” There’s something profound in the way he acknowledged that the traumatic events in the mountains weren’t an aberration of his fate or his destiny, but were a preordained part of it, and his acceptance of the fact is inspiring, as is the way he chose to keep moving forward in the lifetime to follow.


“Roberto rose and rummaged in the fuselage until he found some shards of glass, then he led his three assistants out to the graves. I heard them speaking softly as they worked, but I had no interest in watching them. When they came back, they had small pieces of flesh in their hands.” Cannibalism was addressed with the proper respect and detail it deserved, though it wasn’t as visceral or detailed on how bodies were harvested and consumed as much as Paul Read’s Alive. I don’t have any major insights on the topic, other than to say it is another testament to the courage and grit of the survivors and the horrors they had to endure. The only disgust I have on the topic is at the media for the sensationalized journalistic pieces on the survivors in the months to follow where a twisted rumor spread that no avalanche had occurred at midnight of October 29th and that the survivors willingly chose to kill several of their fellow passengers to eat them.

The focus on religion and Nando’s conception of God is another fascinating part of the book. Many of his fellow survivors talk about how they felt the presence of God on the cordillera, but not Nando, at least not in the way they did. “How can I make sense of a God who sets one religion above the rest, who answers one prayer and ignores another, who sends sixteen young men home and leaves twenty-nine others dead on a mountain?” This strikes the crux of the basis for which Nando constructs his views on God. Not as an Abrahamic All-Knowing entity with a Holy Book, but oddly enough as the embodiment of Love. It sounds corny, but contextually makes sense given all of Nando’s beliefs about the concept of Love.“Love is our only weapon. Only love can turn mere life into a miracle, and draw precious meaning from suffering and fear. For a brief, magical moment, all my fears lifted, and I knew that I would not let death control me. I would walk through the godforsaken country that separated me from my home with love and hope in my heart.” It was the love of his father that drove Nando to climb a mountain and trek 70 miles on foot to reach human civilization, after all.

And so this book is many things. It is a rumination on trauma, tragedy, loss, and how one can pick up the pieces when their entire world has shattered. It is a meditation on death, on how death is a constant, an eternity between which fits the heartbeat known as life, which itself is just a short, fragile dream. It is an exploration of love and what it means to love, and the strength and courage of the human spirit.

“As we used to say in the mountains, ‘Breathe. Breathe again. With every breath, you are alive.’ After all these years, this is still the best advice I can give you: Savor your existence. Live every moment. Do not waste a breath.” — Nando Parrado.

Unbelievable, it reads like a fictional story, so knowing it is true makes it even more breathtaking. A real page turner, with very interesting insights into feelings of despair and hope.
Definitely a must read!

I loved this book - I read it in 3 days, and most of it was staying up until 1AM as I couldn't put it down. I've already seen this movie (3 times) so I knew how it ended, but I guess I just love this story. Nando Parrado is a true hero, and what he did to save 16 lives is amazing and inspiring.

For a while, I’ve wanted to read the book Alive which is an account of this crash. This book was chosen for book club. And wow, I’m so glad it was picked. I was transported to that place and couldn’t put the book down. I will still read Alive and I think it will be a better read now.

(Audiobook) It’s hard to put into words how touching this book is and how absolutely amazing it is that they lived to tell the tale. The relationships of this group were fascinating going INTO the crash and the way they shifted and grew during their time on the mountain was one of my biggest takeaways from the book. They had such a deep rooted respect and love for each other