Survival Stories: Nonfiction

True stories of endurance, bravery, and hope.

Updated June 4, 2023
LINCC (Libraries in Clackamas County)Milwaukie Ledding Library
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Adrift : seventy-six days lost at sea /
Callahan, Steven
Paper Book
Alive : sixteen men, seventy-two days, and insurmountable odds-- the classic adventure of survival in the Andes
Read, Piers Paul
Paper Book
#1 New York Times Bestseller "No one will come away unmoved by the book, and no one will be able to put it down.... There is no way of reading Alive without a heightened sense of one's own life and its value." -- New Republic Sixteen Men, Seventy-Two Days, and...
Alone : orphaned on the ocean
Logan, Richard D.
Paper Book
Terry Jo Duperrault was 11 when her family was murdered at sea aboard a chartered sailboat off the coast of Florida. She jumped overboard just in time to escape. Surviving four days on a cork float in the middle of the ocean, Terry Jo's rescue pictures graced LIFE Magazine soon after she was...
Deep down dark : the untold stories of 33 men buried in a Chilean mine, and the
Tobar, Hector, 1963-
Paper Book
The exclusive, official story of the survival, faith and family of Chile's thirty-three trapped miners, by a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist. When Chile's San Jose mine collapsed outside of Copiapo in August 2010, it trapped thirty-three miners beneath thousands of feet of rock for...
Lost in Shangri-la : a true story of survival, adventure, and the most incredible rescue mission of World War II
Zuckoff, Mitchell.
Paper Book
"A lost world, man-eating tribesmen, lush andimpenetrable jungles, stranded American fliers (one of them a dame withgreat gams, for heaven's sake), a startling rescue mission. . . . This is atrue story made in heaven for a writer as talented as Mitchell Zuckoff. Whew--what an utterly compelling and...
Madhouse at the end of the Earth : the Belgica's journey into the dark Antarctic
Sancton, Julian
Paper Book
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER * The "exquisitely researched and deeply engrossing" (The New York Times) true survival story of an early polar expedition that went terribly awry--with the ship frozen in ice and the crew trapped inside for the entire sunless, Antarctic winter ...
Miracle in the Andes : 72 days on the mountain and my long trek home
Parrado, Nando
Paper Book
The harrowing personal story of the hero of the international bestseller Alive gives a day-by-day account of what happened during the 1972 Andes plane crash and its aftermath and shows how Parrado coped with the stresses; how he kept from giving up; and where he found strength to climb out alive.

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