You know the story. Maybe you saw the movie. In October 1972, a chartered plane carrying a Uruguayan rugby team, their families, and friends clipped a ridge in the Andes and went down at 11,500 feet on a glacier. Sixteen of the forty-five aboard came out alive, seventy-two days later. They had almost no food, no cold-weather gear, and a transistor radio on which they heard the search called off after eight days. Read, a British novelist, got the survivors to talk to him and wrote it straight, without dressing it up: The avalanche that buried them in the fuselage weeks in, the decision to eat their dead and how they argued it into something they could live with, and finally two of them walking out west over the mountains for ten days to bring help. He gives you the group as it actually worked, who led, who broke, who kept the water melting, and he leaves the judgment to you.