Featuring a new introduction by the author to commemorate of the fiftieth anniversary of the crash
“In straightforward, staggeringly honest prose, Nando Parrado tells us what it took—and what it actually felt like—to survive high in the Andes for seventy-two days after having been given up for dead.”—Jon Krakauer, author of Into the Wild
“In the first hours there was nothing, no fear or sadness, just a black and perfect silence.”
Nando Parrado was unconscious for three days before he woke to discover that the plane carrying his rugby team to Chile had crashed deep in the Andes, killing many of his teammates, his mother, and his sister. Stranded with the few remaining survivors on a lifeless glacier and thinking constantly of his father’s grief, Parrado resolved that he could not simply wait to die. So Parrado, an ordinary young man with no particular disposition for leadership or heroism, led an expedition up the treacherous slopes of a snowcapped mountain and across forty-five miles of frozen wilderness in an attempt to save his friends’ lives as well as his own.
Decades after the disaster, Parrado tells his story with remarkable candor and depth of feeling. Miracle in the Andes, a first-person account of the crash and its aftermath, is more than a riveting tale of true-life adventure; it is a revealing look at life at the edge of death and a meditation on the limitless redemptive power of love.
Author
Nando Parrado
Nando Parrado is CEO of four companies in Uruguay and also hosts several popular television programs there, including shows on nature, public affairs, automobiles, and travel. He is one of the most sought-after figures on the international lecture circuit, and has shared the platform with Elizabeth Dole, Doris Kearns Goodwin, Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf, Dee Dee Myers, Sam Donaldson, and Dave Barry. Parrado has also won international awards racing motorcycles, sports cars, stock cars, and watercraft. He speaks five languages and travels extensively. He lives in Montevideo, Uruguay.
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Vince Rause
Vince Rause is a writer and journalist whose stories have appeared in the New York Times Magazine, The Philadelphia Inquirer, and many other publications. He is a regular contributor to the Discovery Channel Online.
Learn More about Vince Rause