Human resilience is inspiring. Despite the unfortunate situations the people at the center of the following stories have found themselves in, they are evidence of the human capacity to claw their way back to safety (sometimes literally).
The following five books tell the stories of men and women who made it out of unthinkable situations and lived to tell the tale. And if you’re more of a film watcher than a book lover, no worries. Each of the following has been adapted for the screen.
‘Endurance: Shackleton’s Incredible Voyage’
Publication date: 1959
Author: Alfred Lansing
As World War I began, Irish explorer Ernest Shackleton set sail with the goal of traversing Antarctica. However, shortly after arriving there, “Endurance,” their ship, “became locked in the ice of the Weddell Sea” mid-January, according to the Royal Museums Greenwich.
The crew lived in the immobilized ship that year until it began to sink in late October, 1915. In total, the crew survived for roughly a year and a half on Antarctic ice.
Lansing’s book tells the incredible survival story of Shackleton’s 27-man crew.
Notable quotation: “We had seen God in His splendors, heard the text that Nature renders. We had reached the naked soul of man.”
‘Touching the Void: The True Story of One Man’s Miraculous Survival’
Publication date: 1988
Author: Joe Simpson
In 1985, British mountaineers Joe Simpson and Simon Yates became the first ever to scale the west side of one of the tallest mountains in the Andes, the Siula Grande.
Partway through their descent, “Simpson plunged down an ice cliff, shattering his leg,” per Redbull.
Since Simpson was unable to walk, Yates tied two 50-meter ropes he was carrying together and began to lower him off a frozen edge they needed to traverse.
Every 50 meters, Simpson would stand on his good leg to give Yates enough slack to move the knot to the other side of his brake system.
However, the Spanish newspaper El Pais described how conditions on the mountain threw a wrench in their system. “The snow stopped Simpson from seeing a cornice in the mountainside, a hidden crevasse: he plummeted 30 meters,” they wrote.
“Yates stopped his fall but Simpson was hanging in the air, and the weight of his partner was pulling on him,” the paper described.
Written by Simpson himself, “Touching the Void” describes the incredible survival story that would follow.
Notable quotation: “There is a peculiar anonymity about being in tents. Once the zip is closed and the outside world barred from sight, all sense of location disappears.”
‘The Boy in the Woods: A True Story of Survival During the Second World War’
Publication date: 2022
Author: Maxwell Smart
Smart was just a boy when his family was taken by Nazis in November 1942. When soldiers were forcing his mother into a truck, she pushed him away and told him to run.
“I was angry,” Smart told The Guardian in an interview earlier this year. “I said: ‘What do you mean you don’t want to take me? You are my mother.’” Although he was angry, he explained, “This saved my life.”
Smart initially went to hide with a family his aunt and uncle had paid to take him, but eventually the family told Smart he was putting their own family in danger.
So, the family taught Smart how to survive in the wilderness, and “for one and a half years, Maxwell survived the loneliness, cold and bands of Ukrainian nationalists who searched the woods for Jews in hiding,” according to The Holocaust Survivor Memoirs Program.
Notable quotation: “My father believed in tough love. He rarely spoke to me, other than to ask how I was doing in school, and he never played with me. However, I know that he loved me. At that time, fathers were often aloof and demanding of their sons — believing that this was the proper way to toughen them up for what lay ahead. Perhaps he was correct.”
‘The Lost City of Z: A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon’
Publication date: 2009
Author: David Grann
This book follows British explorer Percy Fawcett’s attempt to discover El Dorado.
Fawcett had a small crew on this expedition, including just his 21-year-old son, Jack, and his son’s friend Raleigh Rimmel.
The crew “ventured into the jungle for the first time” in the spring of 1925, per History. The last that was heard from Fawcett or his crew was a letter he sent on May 29, 1925, to his wife. He wrote, “Jack is well and fit and getting stronger every day. You need have no fear of any failure.”
As Goodreads describes, Grann’s “quest for the truth and discoveries about Fawcett’s fate and Z form the heart of this complexly enthralling narrative.”
Notable quotation: “...much of the discovery of the world was based on failure rather than on success — on tactical errors and pipe dreams.”
‘Alive: The Story of the Andes Survivors’
Publication date: 1974
Author: Piers Paul Read
In 1972, a 45-passenger plane carrying an Uruguay rugby team, several of their family members and friends crashed in the Andes. The pilot miscalculated where the plane was located, began the descent too early and crashed into a mountain ridge.
Survivors of the crash managed to stay alive for “nearly two and a half months of starvation, frigid temperatures and extreme weather events while trapped on a remote glacier high in the Andes Mountains,” per Time.
In addition to Read’s book, this story has been adapted for the screen several times, including the 1993 film, “Alive,” and the 2023 Netflix series, “Society of the Snow.”
Notable quotation: “‘Oh, God,’ he prayed once again, ‘By all means test us to the limit of our endurance, but please make it humanly possible to go on. Please let there be some sort of path.’”