The true story of a Uruguayan rugby team that crash-lands in the Andes and resorts to cannibalism to survive. The movie (starring Ethan Hawke) is great entertainment, but it lacks the depth and grit of this epic book. Sixteen people—most of them teenagers—survive the crash. Over the next ten weeks on the mountain, conflicts grow and not everyone behaves nobly.
The deeply Catholic survivors are both sustained and haunted by their religion (the Church offers salvation but isn’t cool with the idea of eating people). There’s no savagery in the harshest moments on the mountain. This is an objective depiction of people who fight not only to survive, but to stay human in the process. It’s a spellbinding book. Reviewed on Oct. 21, 2021