BOOK REVIEW: Unbroken

If you have read Laura Hillenbrand’s Seabiscuit you know that she can take the story of a race horse, a story that may not be of great interest to everybody, and turn it in to a #1 Best Seller. In her latest book, UNBROKEN, she starts out with a fascinating man who lived through an extraordinary experience during the Second World War.

Louis Zamperini was born in Torrance, California and spent most of his early teen years in trouble. His defiance and ability to steal anything that seemed to be a challenge would be an asset in the years to come, but to the people of Torrance and to his family he was a delinquent. Everyone assumed that his future would include jail time.

In high school his older brother Pete introduced Louie to the sport of running. Soon the defiance turned to an obsession to run in the Berlin Olympics in 1936. In Berlin, Louie got to know the great Jesse Owens and felt the challenge to steal the flag in front of Hitler’s office which caused a stir among the Germans as well as the press.

Louie was back in Torrance, sitting in a movie theater when Japan attacked Pearl Harbor. Louie was quickly in the air corps. This is when Louis Zamperini’s story really begins.

After being shot down over the Pacific and drifting on a small raft for over a month, Louie washes up on an island that is occupied by the Japanese. What follows is the story of Louie and other prisoners of war in the Pacific. Here his early training as a petty thief and a well conditioned athlete, in addition to his streak of defiance, would save his life. His captors, recognizing his name as an Olympian, tried to use him for propaganda. This may have been also the reason that he was kept alive.

The story of Louie and his fellow prisoners does not stop at the end of the war. To many, the horrors of their experiences lived with them for the rest of their lives. Hillenbrand interviewed many of the surviving men and their family members to give this book an impressive list of notes and acknowledgments.

This was a hard book to put down while I was reading it. I simply could not let Louie and his friends in such horrific conditions. I knew that I had to keep reading until all was well. So much of the war in the Pacific has been glossed over in history books and most of the men that we know who were there are reluctant to talk about their experiences. Laura Hillenbrand found some who told her their stories and were willing to share those stories with us.

This book will be a great find for those who are interested in true stories of the Second World War, but also it is a terrific story of how resilient man can be. As the front cover says, it is “A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption”. It is indeed all of this.