Although this story has been told before in book form (Alive, by Piers Paul Read in 1974) and two movies in 1993, this is the first book in English by one of the survivors. The author begins dramatically with the crash and then backs up to restart the story with his family life, the influence of the school and rugby team. The narrative continues with the trip, the crash, their common and individual ordeals, the daring escape by two of them, immediate aftermath and ends with Nando's subsequent life, including his race car career and family, bringing the reader to the present. It closes with his coming to write this book 20 some years later and how he came to interpret the crash then and now.

Written with Vince Rause, a magazine writer who has also co-authored another book, Miracle in the Andes is an unusually moving story. Although the subject matter alone guarantees that a harrowing and ultimately redemptive tale is in the offing, it is far more than that, mainly because of the author's personal philosophy that resulted from his experience and how this philosophy interprets the many thematic issues in the book.

The profiles of several of his teammates, like Arturo Nogueira, who dies a month after the crash, are quite poignant. As he lay dying, Arturo tells Nando, "I want you to remember, even in this place, our lives have meaning. Our suffering is not for nothing. Even if we are trapped here forever, we can love our families, and God, and each other as long as we live. Even in this place, our lives are worth living." (p. 149) This lesson becomes one of the leitmotifs of the book. The other, to come later, as Nando crosses the Andes, is the tension between life and death and how Nando resolves it.

Other threads of importance in the book are: the meaning of the cannibalism, which the boys explained to themselves at the time as a form of communion--an interpretation later officially confirmed by Catholic authorities in Uruguay, and a rationale generously affirmed by many of the parents of those young men who had died; the value of sport, especially rugby, in inculcating into the young men the value of teamwork under adversity; the importance to him of family ties, most especially the love he felt for his father (his mother died on impact and his sister Susy died soon thereafter); the theme of nostos, i.e., the arduous journey home, in Nando's case over the Andes in essentially tropical clothing with no equipment, a homecoming akin to Odysseus's (but very much unlike Mark Schluter's in Echo Maker) signalled by the immediate and loving welcome by his faithful dog Jimmy; and, finally, the universality of one's apparently uniquely personal story of suffering.

Asked to be a speaker in Mexico in 1991, Nando abruptly abandons his prepared remarks for young business owners as the keynote speaker and spontaneously unloads his story for ninety minutes, after which the audience erupted into applause and, more importantly, demonstrated their acceptance and validation of his story as their own, many of the listeners coming up to him to relate similar tragic burdens in their own lives. After one particular woman told him her story of backing her car over and killing her two year old girl and thanking him for sharing his story, a story that was now allowing her to find the strength to continue to live, Nando embraces her and writes, "I realized that my story is her story. ...But in its essence - the essence of human emotion - it is the most familiar story in the world. We all, at times, face hopelessness and despair. ... The story chills them but also encourages them, because they see that even in the face of the cruelest kind of suffering, and against all odds, an ordinary person can endure,” (p. 283) the core of the equally moving Lest Innocent Blood Be Shed, by Philip Hallie.

The most salient message in the book, however, is the author's epiphany crossing the Andes with Roberto Canessa, now a pediatric cardiologist in Uruguay. As he stands atop an Andean peak on the trek to Chile, transfixed by the beauty, the bleakness and the vastness before him, Nando, like Paul on the road to Damascus, has one of those life-changing moments that is so difficult to enunciate to others:

"I had always thought that life was the actual thing, the natural thing, and that death was simply the end of livng. Now, in this lifeless place, I saw with a terrible clarity that death was the constant, death was the base, and life was only a short, fragile dream. I was dead already. I had been born dead, and what I thought was my life was just a game death let me play as it waited to take me. ... The mountains, for all their power, were not stronger than my attachment to my father. They could not crush my ability to love. I felt a moment of calmness and a clarity, and in that clarity of mind I discovered a simple, astounding secret: Death has an opposite, but the opposite is not mere living. It is not courage or faith or human will. The opposite of death is love." (pp. 200-201)