Captain of the Andes

Captain of the Andes
Author: Margaret H. Harrison
Publisher: Cosimo, Inc.
Total Pages: 278
Release: 2009-01-01
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 1605209139

One of the military leaders of South America's long fight for independence from Spain, Argentinean general Jos de San Martn (1778-1850) is not well known outside Spanish-speaking lands. But his revolutionary spirit and legend as a great hero of Argentina-and of all of South America-makes him a brother in courage and character to the likes of George Washington. First published in 1943, this is one of the very few biographies of the general and political leader in the English language. A lost classic and hard to find in print in an elegant edition, it covers San Martn's childhood in Spain, his early adventures in Peru, the bloody battles of the war to throw off Spanish control of South America, and much more.

Miracle in the Andes

Miracle in the Andes
Author: Nando Parrado
Publisher: Crown
Total Pages: 338
Release: 2007-05-15
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 140009769X

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • A harrowing, moving memoir of the 1972 plane crash that left its survivors stranded on a glacier in the Andes—and one man’s quest to lead them all home—now in a special edition for 2022, commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of the crash, featuring a new introduction by the author “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.

Captain Pantoja and the Special Service

Captain Pantoja and the Special Service
Author: Mario Vargas Llosa
Publisher: Macmillan + ORM
Total Pages: 340
Release: 2011-03-04
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1429922141

This delightful farce opens as the prim and proper Captain Pantoja learns he is to be sent to Peru's Amazon frontier on a secret mission for the army—to provide females for the amorous recruits. Side-splitting complications arise as world of Captain Pantoja's remarkable achievements start to spread.

Mortal Rituals

Mortal Rituals
Author: Matt Rossano
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Total Pages: 248
Release: 2013-08-27
Genre: Science
ISBN: 0231165005

On December 21, 1972, sixteen young survivors of Uruguayan Air Force Flight 571 were rescued after spending ten weeks stranded at the crash site of their plane, high in the remote Andes Mountains. The incident made international headlines and spawned several best-selling books, fueled partly by the fact that the young men had resorted to cannibalism to survive. Matt Rossano examines this story from an evolutionary perspective, weaving together findings and ideas from anthropology, psychology, religion, and cognitive science. During their ordeal, these young men broke "civilized" taboos to fend off starvation and abandoned "civilized" modes of thinking to maintain social unity and individual sanity. Through the power of ritual, the survivors were able to endure severe emotional and physical hardship. Rossano ties their story to our story, seeing in the mortal rituals of this struggle for survival a reflection of what it means to be human.

Imagining Modernity in the Andes

Imagining Modernity in the Andes
Author: Priscilla Archibald
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Total Pages: 207
Release: 2011-01-06
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1611480124

This interdisciplinary work deals with the intersection of projects of modernity with constructions of race and ethnicity in the Andes. The book analyzes indigenista writings, the multidisciplinary work of osé Marìa Arguedas, and the anthropological experiments of the nineteen-fifties. It addresses the relevance of transculturation theory in a transnational age and analyzes the emergence of new visual media in a cultural context long defined by the oral-textual divide.