Stories of survivals following accidents at sea, on the road, or in the air are always intriguing and can be counted on to be popular among the armchair adventurers.

A recent book, “Survive! My Fight for Life in the High Sierras” by Peter Deleo, is just such a story. On a sightseeing trip in the Sierra Nevadas in a single-engine plane, Deleo and his two friends crash into a snowy ravine. Although injured with multiple fractures—16 in all—Deleo leaves his companions, both more injured than he, and begins a trek through the wilderness without water or food. Finally, after struggling though deep snow, a driving blizzard, and tracked by hungry bears, Deleo--- beyond exhaustion---stumbles into a small mountain town.

“Between a Rock and a Hard Place” by Aron Ralston begins with a routine day-hike in the canyons of Utah in 2003. An experienced climber, Ralston’s jaunt turns into a nightmare when a huge rock moves enough to trap his right arm and holds him to the canyon wall for six days. Using his own taped voice from the videotapes he made while trapped, the 28-year old recounts his exhaustion and his mental flights in and out of delirium. He writes with excruciating detail his self-amputation and his subsequent one-armed rappel down a hill and six-mile hike out of the canyon.

“Desperate Journeys, Abandoned Souls” by Edward E. Leslie includes over twenty stories of survival from the 1500’s to the present. Included are the stories of Alexander Selkirk, the model for Robinson Crusoe; Marguerite de la Roeque who was marooned off Labrador by her uncle for the crime of fornication; the crew of the whale ship “Essex”, immortalized in Moby Dick; several World War II survivor stories; and many others. In addition to telling the harrowing stories of the survivors, the author also examines the moral dilemmas they faced and the influence they had—if any—on the literature and art of their period.

“Albatross, the True Story of a Woman’s Survival at Sea” is about a young woman, Debora Scaling Kiley, who had never said “no” to a dare in her life. She joined a group of friends on a large sailboat going from Florida to Maine. This idyllic cruise turned into a nightmare when a seventy-knot storm comes out of nowhere to shred the sails. Later, a forty-foot wave crashes through the cabin and sinks the ship. Debora, along with the four other crew, are left adrift in a storm-tossed rubber dinghy that is soon surrounded by sharks. Weeks later, when the dinghy is spotted by a Russian freighter, only two of the group is alive.

“Alive, the Story of the Andes Survivors” by Piers Paul Read recounts the aftermath of a commercial airliner crash in October, 1972 on a remote and windswept Andean peak. Out of the forty-five original passengers, including a team of college rugby players, only sixteen survive the ten excruciating weeks in their inhospitable surroundings. This harrowing story, still very popular with high school students and college-age youth, describes how these young men stayed alive by resorting to cannibalism. The Library also owns the video “Alive”. A testament to the appeal of this real-life story is that the video has been checked out 203 times!

A browser can find these books and others by going to the Library’s website at www.columbuslibrary.info , clicking on the “card catalog”, typing in the word, “survival”, and searching under “subject”.