Nando Parrado regained consciousness to discover that the plane carrying his rugby team, as well as family members and supporters, had crashed deep in the Andes. Many were dead or dying, among them his own mother and sister. Those who remained were stranded on a glacier at nearly 12,000 feet, with no supplies and no means of summoning help. They struggled to endure freezing temperatures, deadly avalanches, and then the devastating news that the search...

Describes the ordeal of the survivors of an airplane crash in 1972 in the Andes wilderness in which over half of the forty-five passengers died, discussing the challenges the men faced during their ten weeks in the shelter of the plane's fuselage without supplies and with little hope of rescue.

Throughout history, the most harrowing stories of human survival, like that of the Donner Party in the 1840s, have involved people whose only means of staying alive was to cannibalize the deceased around them. On Friday the 13th of October, 1972, just such a story began when a charter plane carrying 45 rugby team members crashed in the remote Andes Mountains. For 72 days, the world thought they were dead. But what 16 survivors endured was far worse...