It’s 1945. The War is winding down, but there are still bases, well, everywhere, including in New Guinea in the Pacific Ocean. Because New Guinea is not the most exciting place to be, they host occasional morale-boosting airplane tours to “Shangri-la”–an untouched, pristine, and gorgeous valley in the middle of rugged, inhospitable mountains (on a rugged, inhospitable island), just recently discovered. In May, a plane carrying 24 soldiers and members of the Women’s Army Corps (WAC), crashed en route to Shangri-la. Only three survived. They have to […]
A Book You Can Really Lose Yourself In
This WWII survival story kept me at attention over the five page-turning days I read it (in case you aren’t impressed, that’s pretty fast for me). Lost in Shangri-La is the true story of how an army airplane crashed in New Guinea during World War II and the survivors encountered Stone Age cannabilistic tribes in their quest for survival. And besides surviving the plane crash and cannibals, there was the terrain, weather, injuries, gangrene, and the fact that Shangri-La was completely inaccessible to the outside […]
Escape from Shangri-la
I was so bummed when I read badkittyuno’s review last year and realized that, since it was an audiobook, I couldn’t immediately borrow Lost in Shangri-La. “At two o’clock in the afternoon it was time to go. As the passengers lined up outside the Gremlin Special, Prossen told them to expect the tour to last three hours.” In May of 1945 a morale-boosting plane ride crashed over an unexplored Dutch New Guinea valley servicemen called Shangri-la. Three survivors emerged from the crash: a lieutenant whose […]
Lost in Shangri-la by Mitchell Zuckoff
I started this audiobook, Lost in Shangri-la: A True Story of Survival, Adventure, and the Most Incredible Rescue Mission of World War II, while I was waiting for the library to get the next book from the Century Trilogy in on CD because it was a free download and sounded vaguely familiar. It turned out to be really good, way more interesting than I expected. “Fear is something I don’t think you experience unless you have a choice. If you have a choice, then you’re liable to […]