Brief Summary of Alive: The Story of the Andes Survivors by Piers Paul Read.

Zerbino took hold of the bleeding muscle, pulled it around to its proper place, and then bound up his leg with a white shirt” (Read 30). Young boys struggling in the plane watched as Zerbino and Canessa, their role models, attempted to save lives of the poor people that were suffering. Slowly the injuries started to gradually get worse and people started dying right in front of the survivors. As time went on, it was decided to slowly start thinking of ways to just survive the night. The dead were put in the snow outside and the injured, along with the people that were stable, were to remain inside. People started to take control of the situation. “Marcelo Perez, with the help of a hefty wing forward named Roy Harley, had done his best to build a barrier against the cold with anything that came to hand- especially the seats and suitcases” (Read 35). They worked together as leaders for survival. There were several leaders that formed and calmed people down. Many people were losing hope and losing themselves. “Pancho Delgado, a law student who hobbled around the plane on his one good leg talking cheerfully to the other and eloquently insisting that God

Peru is located in western South America and it shares borders with Chile, Bolivia, Brazil, Colombia and Ecuador and the South Pacific Ocean. Peru is about 1.28 million square kilometers. There are three major regions in Peru: a narrow coastal belt, the wide Andean mountains and the Amazon Basin. The coast is mostly a desert, but contains Peru's major cities. The Andes has two main ranges - Cordillera Occidental and Oriental. Oriental includes Peru's highest mountain called Huascaran, it a peaks out at 22,200ft. On the east side is the Amazon Basin, a region of tropical lowland, the water there is carried out by the Maranon and Ucayali rivers.

When we think about society there is often a stark contrast between the controversy projected in our media about the issues that our society faces and the mellow, safe view we have of our own smaller, more tangible ‘local’ society. This leads us to believe that our way of life is protected and our rights secured by that concept of society that has been fabricated and built upon during the course of our short lives. However, what if society were not what we perceive it to be, and the government chose to exercise its power in an oppressive manner? As a society we would like to think that we ourselves are above such cruelty, yet as The Lonely Crossing of Juan Cabrera recounts the state of Cuba in the 1990’s so must we remember that all societies and governments view the individual differently as opposed to the whole. Each group has unique expectations that are enforced upon the individual goes beyond those expectations. The individual can very quickly find their rose glasses view of their society cracking before their very eyes as the reality of taking such a rise comes into view.

Soldiers didn’t received adequate supplies of meat and bread. Most of the soldiers survived on “firecake”, a tasteless mixture of flour and water, and “pepper pot soup”, a black pepper-flavored tripe broth. Snow was often too thin to make into drinking water. Animals also starved to death. At the end of the winter there were about 700 hundred horses left.

The S.S Officers did not bother to feed their prisoners. The prisoners started to eat the ice off of each other’s backs for water. The officers did not care whether or not the prisoners were going to live because the final solution was extermination.. Eliezer saved his bread to eat for later.

Have you ever been driven out of your own home? Have you ever felt like a total outsider? My book The Survivors by Will Weaver is a young adult fiction, written in third-person, about a family who was driven from their home outside Minneapolis, the Newells and is now living in a cabin in the north woods. The main characters, Sarah and Miles, are forced to live like the locals and are not supposed to come off as homeless “Travelers.” They are faced with many challenges that hold them back and also force them to do stuff they don’t want to do.

The story of “Survivors”; written by Kim Adonizio tells a perspective of a homosexual man who ponders the issues of dealing with his dying lover’s family, while having to fight with societal pressures alone. They both have contracted the AID’s virus and he has a possibility of dying first. The irony in this story is that this young man wants to die first. He finds that dealing with the societal pressures of homosexuality is too much in a world that is much less accepting of the LGBT community in 1995. Society has already placed a strain on those that are heterosexual, so the amount of abuse that a homosexual person may feel can be great. Adonizio presents these many issues the gay community deals with in society in a very tightly pack paragraph. Although this story is short, it causes the reader to be faced with many different occurring themes. These themes are very easy to miss sense they all hit the reader seemingly at the same time. The central theme of this story is that some homosexuals dealing with the pressures of society face child abuse, unacceptance and early death.

In the United States, the Hispanic race refers to people from Cuba, Mexico, Puerto Rico, South America, Central American, and other countries of Spanish origin. According to the 2010 Census,

People with injuries were stable, sleeping conditions were organized, and rations of food were set. But in time, they ran out of food. A council was made to form decisions to not only benefit themselves as individuals but as a group. The leaders of the council struggled deciding upon certain decisions but ended up doing whatever they had to do to survive. The only awful thing they had as an option was each the meat on the people who were already dead. So many people disagreed with putrid disgust but the leaders did everything in their power to convince the others that that was there only option of survival. “Canessa took it upon himself to prove his resolution. He prayed to God to help him do what he knew to be right and then took a piece of meat in his hand and ate it. Later that evening, small groups of boys came out of the plane to follow his example” (Read 81,82). Canessa became the leader and did the horrifying act, and saved all their lives by doing so. They told themselves that it was God’s plan for them to survive and the others to die so that they could eat the dead bodies. Things started to become awfully normally. They all would have jobs. Some would take care of the food, some would take care of the injured, and some would take care of where they slept. They would live day-by-day hoping for a rescue. Until the avalanche hit. The Plane was almost entirely filled with snow, burying almost all the sleeping survivors. The wall at the entrance had been toppled and buried, and the blankets and cushions disappeared. Roy was the only one who was awake after the avalanche who could help the others. He was forced to be the hero and he was petrified. “He found himself standing buried up to his waist and when he took the shirt from his eyes what he saw appalled him. He felt desperate; he alone seemed to be free to help” (Read 121). Even though he was mortified, he took the responsibility of being the leader and saving

In the article, Honduran Enterpreneur helps Central American Immigrants Gain Legal Status in Mexico by Mayela Sanchez states that Nora Rodriguez is a hero because she helps others and is a light for other people that need help. Mayela is a woman who helps Central Americans with their immigration paperwork. In the article Mayela states, "Rodriguez's efforts on belief of her community go beyond .. paperwork.. she and her nine other Central Americans formed an organization in February 2013 called Comunidad Centroamericana." This quote shows you how passionate she is about her job and how much she loves helping others. She legit formed an organization to be able to help twice as much people as she already does. She is very passionate about her

“Canessa began a continuous dialogue with God … ‘You can make it tough, God,’ he prayed, ‘but don’t make it impossible.’” Faith and prayer guided the survivors in their decision making on the mountain, and they were essential to the survival of the men. The Catholic faith, along with prayer, can lead a person to do marvelous things. The survivors of the crash in the Andes Mountains were extraordinary examples of this. All of the young men had grown up in Catholic families, and they had received a Catholic education. Because of their strong faith, their relationship with God became a crucial part of their decision making and survival on the mountain. Prayer would reassure them that God was with them and guiding them every day. When the group decided to eat the dead, their

During the sixteenth century, the indigenous people of Peru, the Incas, endured the harsh rule of the Spanish. In response to this, an Inca nobleman named Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala created manuscripts in his book El Primer Nueva Corónica y Buen Gobierno (The First New Chronicle and Good Government) in which he illustrated the mistreatment of the Incas. Guaman Poma de Ayala’s book was deliberately created for the King of Spain, Philip III, to show how the intolerable Spanish rule was negatively impacting the Incas (Encyclopædia Britannica). One drawing from the book in particular, Padre Que Haze Tejer Ropa Por Fuerza a Las Yndias (The Parish Priest Threatens the Native Weaver Who Works at His Command), depicts a Spanish conquistador with a weapon standing over a crying indigenous woman as she weaves cloth. The Inca woman in the illustration worked for the Spanish under the system of mita. After the Spanish colonized the Andes, they implemented a labor system in which the Incas were forced to work for the good of the Spanish, earning little in return. In portraying the Spanish so negatively, Guaman Poma de Ayala sought to

The enthralling novel Alive, by Piers Paul Read, is the heart-wrenching story of the survival of great, faithful men and women in the barren, inhospitable region, called the cordillera. The tragedy of the plane crash begins as they are casually flying over the beautiful white capped mountains of the Andes to an exciting rugby game in Chile. In these mountains, there are updrafts of warm air, which caused the plane to go out of control and crash into the peak. After the plane had settled into the snow, only thirty two of the forty passengers survived the intense impact. During their time in the crashed plane, the number of people slowly diminishes, however, their love for each other and their community grows. This loving community kept

Novels often give us a picture of what life in a different time period was like. Historical novels especially give us accurate representations of life in other places in history. The novels Death in the Andes and The Underdogs give us a glimpse of what life was like in certain areas of South America when they were war-torn.

Throughout the entirety of my story, I touch on topics discussed/read about in class. My story is a description of not only my journey to Machu Picchu, but my journey to self discovery and patience. The story suggests a struggle throughout the entirety of the journey. The idea of leaving the comfortable in order to experience a spiritual journey is a topic which we discussed in class. For a transformation to occur during a spiritual journey, one must leave the comfortable aspects of life, and be willing to enter the unknown, which I did. During my time seated at the edge of the rocks, I entered a dangerous state of mind; I thought about my grandma who had recently died, and how she impacted my life. That train of thought could have gone