Nando Parrado: author interview - Orion Publishing GroupNando Parrado is one of those rare humans. Spend five minutes with him and you feel the weight of the day fall off your shoulders and realise that it isn’t good to be alive, it is bloody marvellous. Parrado knows this more than most. On Friday, 13th October 1972 the 19-year-old Uruguayan was flying to Chile with his rugby team when their plane smashed into the frozen Andes. What followed was 72 days of hell, as the handful of survivors [was] forced to eat the flesh of their dead to avoid starvation before Parrado and fellow survivors Roberto Canesso and Antonio Vizinti embarked on a heroic trek across the treacherous mountains that led to their rescue. The nightmare was made into the 1993 film Alive! adapted from Piers Paul Reid’s eponymous book. Now Parrado has written the only first-hand account of what happened in that remote place.
I must be picky, but I find it a little difficult to feel quite the same glowing enthusiasm for meeting this guy … what if he’s hungry?
In fairness, I love reading survival stories, and this sounds like a corker.
