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.