Unbroken by Laura Hillenbrand was recommended to me last year by my student teaching mentor. I didn't really know what it was about other than being set in WWII, but I did know that it was written by the author of Seabiscuit, and the cover looked appealing, so I decided to try it out.
It was an amazing book. No, it was more than amazing. I don't even know the word to describe how great it was.
Louis Zamperini was the most troublesome child I have ever heard of. I thought of all the kids I've worked with or taught at camps, day cares, and in school, and couldn't think of one that came close to wreaking the havoc that Louie did. The first few chapters start off describing his childhood escapades, defining his personality and setting the stage for the rest of his life. As he grew, his older brother convinced him to channel his wild spirit into running track and Louis ended up competing in the Olympics. He was becoming famous for breaking records all across the US, even meeting Hitler at the 1936 Games in Berlin, and worked his tail off training to run a four-minute-mile. This was a feat that at that time had never been accomplished anywhere in the world, and he was so close in his training to be able to reach his goal for the next Olympic games until WWII got in the way.
Suddenly finding himself in the role of an Air Force bomber, Louie’s troublemaker spirit stayed with him as he completed mission after mission, barely making it back alive from some of them, with his crew in the Pacific. The amazing thing about Hillenbrand’s writing is that she can describe everything down to the last minuscule detail in such a way that the reader is fully captivated. I couldn’t put the book down while reading about the nine hundred and something-odd bullet holes (she writes the exact number in the book) in Louie’s plane when he returned from one particularly difficult mission. One thing that really struck me was how she described the safety precautions - or lack thereof - for the war planes in the first years of America’s involvement in the war. Many more soldiers died because of accidents or faulty equipment than because of the enemy. It is a mechanical accident that gets Louis into trouble when his plane crashes over a wide stretch of the Pacific, and this is where we really start to see his resilience and survival skills take control.
Just thinking back to the book, the treachery of the vast open ocean and the deathly abuse of multiple POW camps that Louie endured, makes me pause and reflect. Everything is written in such detail and I could not put it down. It was not an enjoyable read as in uplifting or fun, but it was incredible in a different way. Theoretically, anyone could have written a survival story about a WWII POW, but in this case everything is absolutely true (there are pages and pages of citations in the back of the book from documents and research that Hillenbrand used to write the book as well as the many interviews she conducted with Louie, his family and friends, and many other sources.) After reading Unbroken, I know that Louie was meant to survive and that his story was meant to be shared with the world.
I imagine that at one point he may have thought his greatest contribution would be breaking the four-minute-mile, but in reality I believe that it was the way he lived his life after his WWII experience. Never in a million years would I wish the things he went through onto anyone. There were many times reading this book that I found myself stopping to gasp, or read a page again because I couldn’t believe what I had just read. I kept flipping back to pages that had old pictures of Louie, his family, his fellow soldiers, and his captors on them. Those were what really hit this book home for me, seeing the actual people from the events.
This is a must-read. Let me repeat that: THIS BOOK IS A MUST-READ!!!!! I don’t care if you “don’t like” non-fiction or were never interested in war-time settings. Those things aren’t what this book is about. This book is about Louis Zamperini, his amazing story, and connecting yourself with him and a piece of our history that is in danger of being forgotten because nobody really wants to remember.
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