During World War II when this area was discovered it was full of cannibalistic natives who's tribes fought each other constantly.
A military base some miles from Shangri-La used to do fly-overs (landing was near impossible) so they could get a look at the natives. It was a nice Sunday afternoon activity.
One of these flights crash landed smack dab in the middle of the so-named Shangri-La with only 3 survivors out of 20 some odd people on the plane.
This is the story of that crash landing, how the three survived among the natives (One of whom was a WAC - this stands for Women's Army Corp - in other words, she was a woman!) and how they were rescued - which was no small feat in itself since planes could not land in the area.
I enjoyed the book a lot - as someone who was interested in anthropology in high school and college it was interesting to read about the natives from the perspective of these white people who never even tried to learn their language. It was like it never occurred to them that the natives had a language that could be learned.
The thing I didn't like about the book is that the author often went off on tangents about things that were only ancillary to the book and I felt were not important to the story. You had to slog through those parts to get back to the story which was the exciting and interesting parts of the book. I'd say worth the read anyway.
Rating: 7 / 10
ISBN: 9780061988356
Publisher: Harper Perennial
Edition: 1st Paperback Edition