I’m looking for some books, web sites, whatever, that give first-hand accounts of people surviving difficult situations. Mountain climbing and hiking accounts seem to be pretty popular, so I would like to limit this thread to other types of situations. For example, the hostages held in Iran after the revolution, or people that experienced slavery (historical or contemporary), etc. Other than the no moutain climbers, just about anything is game.
Any suggestions?
Well you said anything is game, but do they have to be real situations? World War Z is a book with nothing but first hand accounts of people surviving a world wide zombie epidemic. I just finished it and it was incredibly good.
Skeletons on the Zahara by Dean King is based on contemporary sources and tells what happened to some American sailors shipwrecked off the coast of Africa in the 1800’s and sold into slavery.
Discovery Channel (or one of those) did a documentary on it, but it lacked something. Maybe because they couldn’t find emaciated actors to play the roles. Hard to believe people are starving when they’re so well muscled, and that their skin is flaking off when, well, it’s not. Where’s the FX budget? 
I’d also recommend Batavia’s Graveyard by Michael Dash – survival on a Dutch sailing vessel in the 1600’s, and survival again after the shipwreck, and more survival involving a psychopathic murderer who took charge of the survivors. Good stuff.
Well, it does involve a mountain, but not a climber.
There’s a video recording a guy from a Seattle TV station made, after the eruption of Mt. St. Helens. His name was David Crockett. I’ve seen the video and heard the recording he made, as he walked away from the ash cloud, but I can’t find it online.
The following is a link to a Time magazine article that mentions him.
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,924152,00.html
Really spooky. “I honestly think I’m dead”
Eight Bullets (Claudia Brenner): By a lesbian who was shot by a man while camping. Her lover was killed. She had to hike miles while severely wounded to get to the road.
Strange Piece of Paradise (Terri Jentz): Run over with a jeep and then hacked with an axe by a man while camping.
17th and 18th-C. [URL=http://womenshistory.about.com/library/weekly/aa020920a.htmIndian captivity narratives – recounting violence, warfare, disease, and hunger, plus the anguish of sexual exploitation, loneliness and bereavement (typically of one’s family, slaughtered in the Indian raid resulting in the narrator’s captivity), foreign language immersion and culture shock – with some of these hardships to be revisited when the narrator is recaptured by (or escapes to) a white settlement, possibly many years after she was lost to the Indians…
The last 10-15 years were an Oprah-induced slog of “my shitty childhood” memoirs, all of which I would not recommend to the OP.
As for great adventure stories, I will recommend The Long Walk by Slavomir Rawicz, a young Polish officer sent by the Soviets to Siberia, from which he and his companions walked all the way to India.
And then there’s Papillon & Banco. One of the reasons the books are better than the movie is that the message that, despite the unjustness of his treatment, it made him a better person and ultimately gained him a better life than if he’d stayed in Paris. (although one advantage the movie does offer is Mel from Alice hitting on Will Robinson from Lost in Space)
The downside of both these adventure stories is that there’s a pretty good chance they’re made up. But that’s just one of the fact of life: when old men write their memoirs, they lie. Take comfort from that, for should you write yours, you shall too.
The Wreck of the Hesperus section in Julian Barnes’s A History of the World in 10 1/2 Chapters. Bunch of dudes on a ship that went down, end up on a raft, then eat each other. Ghastly business.
Similarly, Alive (though it’s on a mountain, but they’re not mountaineers).
Captain Bligh’s Portable Nightmare which, despite the awful review on Amazon, I thought was very good, and the story of how Bligh managed to keep his crew alive after having been set adrift in a rowing boat, navigating more than 4,000 miles from memory, and even definitively mapping the areas he passed before arriving in port safely, is jaw-dropping, and gives you a very different view of a man usually classed as a villain.
Finally, the most incredible of all, Endurance: Ernest Shackleton’s Incredible Voyage is nothing less than mindblowing: on the way to the south pole, Shackleton’s ship gets locked in Antarctic ice, and he and an Irish crew member, Tom Crean set out alone, floating on ice, battered by storms, attacked by killer whales, get a boat and cross the South Atlantic to South Georgia, cross a range of at-the-time uncharted mountains, get help, return, and save everyone, and lived to tell the tale. The is without a shadow of a doubt the most astonishing story of endurance and perseverance I think I have ever heard of. Those men were hard as fucking nails.
**Alive ** by Piers Paul Reid, about the plane crash in the Andes.
Try Victor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning, which apart from divining a wonderful philosophy from dire circumstances, has some really fine writing.
*Another time we were at work in a trench. The dawn was grey around us; grey was the sky above; grey the snow in the pale light of dawn; grey the rags in which my fellow prisoners were clad, and grey their faces. *
Oops, got muddled up by memories of the Muppets singing Lydia the Tattooed Lady. I meant The Raft of the Medusa.
Reader’s Digest features such stories regularly, or used to – look for anything subtitled “Drama in Real Life.”
Winter Time: Memoirs of a German Sinto [Gypsy] who Survived Auschwitz
Walter Winter was conscripted into the German navy in World War 2, then discharged on racial grounds.
Shortly afterwards, he was deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau and later sent to Ravensbrūck just prior to the extermination of the Gypsy camp in August 1944 - (Zigeunernacht). From Ravensbrūck, he was sent on to Sachsenhausen.
At the latter stages of the war, he was released and re-conscripted in order to fight the Russians.
It’s an absolutely amazing story and a fantastic book.
A tad obscure, but you might find I was Chaplain on the Franklin by Joseph O’Callahan* worth a look. The Franklin was the most heavily damaged US Navy ship to survive during WWII, and Father O’Callahan’s activities in saving the ship earned him the Congressional Medal of Honor.
*Disclaimer: I don’t normally hang out at FReeper, but it seemed to have the best biography. Regard the rest of the page at your peril.
Seconded. Shackleton’s expedition is the most amazing tale of survival ever told. There are many books available on the subject; some written by those who were there. Incredibly, there are pictures and movies available, which were taken during that voyage.
“And I Alone Survived” by Lauren Elder. She was the only survivor of a light plane that crashed in the Rockies, high up on the side of a mountain. She had broken bones and other serious injuries but hiked out and down the mountain.
Political prisoner accounts:
[[URL=http://www.amazon.com/Prisonniere-Twenty-Years-Desert-Gaol/dp/B000KL3F42/sr=1-3/qid=1168809071/ref=sr_1_3/002-5552520-3815234?ie=UTF8&s=books]La Prisonniere - 20 years in a desert jail](http://www.amazon.com/Balzac-Little-Chinese-Seamstress-Novel/dp/0385722206/sr=8-1/qid=1168808976/ref=pd_bbs_1/002-5552520-3815234?ie=UTF8&s=booksBalzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress[/URL)
Anything by Primo Levi.
Well, what the hell happened there? Serves me right for not previewing.
Let’s try again. Political prisoner accounts:
Stolen Lives - 20 years in a desert jail - better link anyway, the other one is out of print.
Balzac and the little Chinese seamstress
Anything by Primo Levi.
Adrift: Seventy-six Days Lost at Sea by Steven Callahan.
Callahan was six days out from the Canary Islands when his sloop sank. He wound up in an inflatable raft with almost no food or water. He spent the next two and a half months adrift in that raft, living mostly on fish caught with a broken spear from his spear gun and water from a solar still. The book is a detailed first-hand account of his experience.
http://www.amazon.com/No-Surrender-Thirty-Year-Bluejacket-Books/dp/1557506639/sr=8-1/qid=1168811339/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1/002-5813655-7511268?ie=UTF8&s=books
I highly recommend this book written by the Japanese soldier Hiroo Onoda, who surrendered nearly 30 years after the second World War. The book is a firsthand acccount about his life, and details how he survived in the Philippine jungle. Hiroo’s story is really uplifting because of his positive attitude.