Claude Rawson, the Maynard Mack Professor of English at Yale University, spoke to me about the tendency of those who have been reduced to survival-cannibalism to speak openly about the experience—often to the horror of their listeners (personal communication, November 13, 1998). The loquacity of the sixteen survivors of an airplane crash in the Andes in 1972 made possible Piers Paul Read’s now famous account of survival-cannibalism, Alive: The Story of the Andes Survivors.
