Rating: *****
Tags: General, United States, History, Biography & Autobiography, Biography, Sports, World War; 1939-1945, Prisoners of War, Prisoners of War - Japan, World War II, World War; 1939-1945 - Aerial Operations; American, World War; 1939-1945 - Campaigns - Pacific Area, World War; 1939-1945 - Prisoners and Prisons; Japanese, Prisoners and Prisons; Japanese, Zamperini; Louis, Prisoners of War - United States, Long-Distance Runners - United States, Japan, Military, Long-Distance Runners, Lang:en
Summary
On a May afternoon in 1943, an Army Air Forces bomber
crashed into the Pacific Ocean and disappeared, leaving only a
spray of debris and a slick of oil, gasoline, and blood.
Then, on the ocean surface, a face appeared. It was
that of a young lieutenant, the plane’s bombardier, who
was struggling to a life raft and pulling himself aboard.
So began one of the most extraordinary odysseys of the Second
World War.
The lieutenant’s name was Louis Zamperini. In
boyhood, he’d been a cunning and incorrigible delinquent,
breaking into houses, brawling, and fleeing his home to ride
the rails. As a teenager, he had channeled his defiance
into running, discovering a prodigious talent that had carried
him to the Berlin Olympics and within sight of the four-minute
mile. But when war had come, the athlete had become an
airman, embarking on a journey that led to his doomed flight, a
tiny raft, and a drift into the unknown.
Ahead of Zamperini lay thousands of miles of open ocean,
leaping sharks, a foundering raft, thirst and starvation, enemy
aircraft, and, beyond, a trial even greater. Driven to
the limits of endurance, Zamperini would answer desperation
with ingenuity; suffering with hope, resolve, and humor;
brutality with rebellion. His fate, whether triumph or
tragedy, would be suspended on the fraying wire of his will.
In her long-awaited new book, Laura Hillenbrand writes with
the same rich and vivid narrative voice she displayed in
Seabiscuit. Telling an unforgettable story of a
man’s journey into extremity, Unbroken is a testament to
the resilience of the human mind, body, and spirit.
Amazon Best Books of the Month, November 2010:
From Laura Hillenbrand, the bestselling author of
Seabiscuit, comes
Unbroken, the inspiring true story of a man who lived
through a series of catastrophes almost too incredible to be
believed. In evocative, immediate descriptions, Hillenbrand
unfurls the story of Louie Zamperini--a juvenile
delinquent-turned-Olympic runner-turned-Army hero. During a
routine search mission over the Pacific, Louie’s plane
crashed into the ocean, and what happened to him over the next
three years of his life is a story that will keep you glued to
the pages, eagerly awaiting the next turn in the story and
fearing it at the same time. You’ll cheer for the man who
somehow maintained his selfhood and humanity despite the
monumental degradations he suffered, and you’ll want to
share this book with everyone you know.
--Juliet Disparte
The Story of
Unbroken by Laura Hillenbrand
Eight years ago, an old man told me a story that took my
breath away. His name was Louie Zamperini, and from the day I
first spoke to him, his almost incomprehensibly dramatic life
was my obsession. It was a horse--the subject of my first book,
Seabiscuit: An American Legend--who led me to Louie.
As I researched the Depression-era racehorse, I kept coming
across stories about Louie, a 1930s track star who endured an
amazing odyssey in World War II. I knew only a little about him
then, but I couldn’t shake him from my mind. After I
finished
Seabiscuit, I tracked Louie down, called him and asked
about his life. For the next hour, he had me transfixed. Growing up in California in the 1920s, Louie was a
hellraiser, stealing everything edible that he could carry,
staging elaborate pranks, getting in fistfights, and bedeviling
the local police. But as a teenager, he emerged as one of the
greatest runners America had ever seen, competing at the 1936
Berlin Olympics, where he put on a sensational performance,
crossed paths with Hitler, and stole a German flag right off
the Reich Chancellery. He was preparing for the 1940 Olympics,
and closing in on the fabled four-minute mile, when World War
II began. Louie joined the Army Air Corps, becoming a
bombardier. Stationed on Oahu, he survived harrowing combat,
including an epic air battle that ended when his plane
crash-landed, some six hundred holes in its fuselage and half
the crew seriously wounded. On a May afternoon in 1943, Louie took off on a search
mission for a lost plane. Somewhere over the Pacific, the
engines on his bomber failed. The plane plummeted into the sea,
leaving Louie and two other men stranded on a tiny raft.
Drifting for weeks and thousands of miles, they endured
starvation and desperate thirst, sharks that leapt aboard the
raft, trying to drag them off, a machine-gun attack from a
Japanese bomber, and a typhoon with waves some forty feet high.
At last, they spotted an island. As they rowed toward it,
unbeknownst to them, a Japanese military boat was lurking
nearby. Louie’s journey had only just begun. That first conversation with Louie was a pivot point in my
life. Fascinated by his experiences, and the mystery of how a
man could overcome so much, I began a seven-year journey
through his story. I found it in diaries, letters and
unpublished memoirs; in the memories of his family and friends,
fellow Olympians, former American airmen and Japanese veterans;
in forgotten papers in archives as far-flung as Oslo and
Canberra. Along the way, there were staggering surprises, and
Louie’s unlikely, inspiring story came alive for me. It
is a tale of daring, defiance, persistence, ingenuity, and the
ferocious will of a man who refused to be broken. The culmination of my journey is my new book,
Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and
Redemption. I hope you are as spellbound by Louie’s
life as I am. Starred Review. From the 1936 Olympics to WWII Japan's most
brutal POW camps, Hillenbrand's heart-wrenching new book is
thousands of miles and a world away from the racing circuit of
her bestselling Seabiscuit. But it's just as much a
page-turner, and its hero, Louie Zamperini, is just as
loveable: a disciplined champion racer who ran in the Berlin
Olympics, he's a wit, a prankster, and a reformed juvenile
delinquent who put his thieving skills to good use in the POW
camps, In other words, Louie is a total charmer, a lover of
life--whose will to live is cruelly tested when he becomes an
Army Air Corps bombardier in 1941. The young Italian-American
from Torrance, Calif., was expected to be the first to run a
four-minute mile. After an astonishing but losing race at the
1936 Olympics, Louie was hoping for gold in the 1940 games. But
war ended those dreams forever. In May 1943 his B-24 crashed
into the Pacific. After a record-breaking 47 days adrift on a
shark-encircled life raft with his pal and pilot, Russell Allen
"Phil" Phillips, they were captured by the Japanese. In the
"theater of cruelty" that was the Japanese POW camp network,
Louie landed in the cruelest theaters of all: Omori and
Naoetsu, under the control of Corp. Mutsuhiro Watanabe, a
pathologically brutal sadist (called the Bird by camp inmates)
who never killed his victims outright--his pleasure came from
their slow, unending torment. After one beating, as Watanabe
left Louie's cell, Louie saw on his face a "soft languor.... It
was an expression of sexual rapture." And Louie, with his
defiant and unbreakable spirit, was Watanabe's victim of
choice. By war's end, Louie was near death. When Naoetsu was
liberated in mid-August 1945, a depleted Louie's only thought
was "I'm free! I'm free! I'm free!" But as Hillenbrand shows,
Louie was not yet free. Even as, returning stateside, he
impulsively married the beautiful Cynthia Applewhite and tried
to build a life, Louie remained in the Bird's clutches, haunted
in his dreams, drinking to forget, and obsessed with vengeance.
In one of several sections where Hillenbrand steps back for a
larger view, she writes movingly of the thousands of postwar
Pacific PTSD sufferers. With no help for their as yet
unrecognized illness, Hillenbrand says, "there was no one right
way to peace; each man had to find his own path...." The book's
final section is the story of how, with Cynthia's help, Louie
found his path. It is impossible to condense the rich, granular
detail of Hillenbrand's narrative of the atrocities committed
(one man was exhibited naked in a Tokyo zoo for the Japanese to
"gawk at his filthy, sore-encrusted body") against American
POWs in Japan, and the courage of Louie and his fellow POWs,
who made attempts on Watanabe's life, committed sabotage, and
risked their own lives to save others. Hillenbrand's triumph is
that in telling Louie's story (he's now in his 90s), she tells
the stories of thousands whose suffering has been mostly
forgotten. She restores to our collective memory this tale of
heroism, cruelty, life, death, joy, suffering, remorselessness,
and redemption. (Nov.) -Reviewed by Sarah F. Gold
Amazon.com Review
From Publishers Weekly
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