Miracle in the Andes - 72 Days on the Mountain and My Long Trek Home

Miracle in the Andes - 72 Days on the Mountain and My Long Trek Home

by Nando Parrado with Vincent Rause

Orion, HK$177

A week after the plane crash, Nando Parrado stood outside the wrecked fuselage and examined his chocolate-covered peanut. This was the last food he would get so it had to last. He sucked the chocolate off the nut. The next day he split it in two and ate half. The second part he swallowed on the third day.

We know what's coming next: the awful realisation that, to survive, Parrado and his companions must eat the flesh of fellow passengers who died after their plane slammed into a 3,300-metre mountain on the Argentina-Chile border during a storm in October 1972.

But before we get to that point there are 16 pages of photos to show, as the text has already done, that Parrado and his fellow survivors aren't monsters but ordinary young men. There are none of the photos of human bones and rotting body parts strewn across the snow that would later adorn newspaper pages across the world. Instead, we see fit young men on a rugby pitch, a besuited Parrado at home in the Uruguayan capital Montevideo, shots of the survivors in the snow outside the wrecked plane and photos of the emaciated author when, after 21/2 months in the mountains, he finally reaches a valley and brings back a rescue team.

Of the 45 people on the plane, 16 came out alive. Their survival, Parrado is at pains to point out,