Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience and Redemption in The Dusty Bookshelf

Mar 30, 2011 Beth rated it it was amazing

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UNBROKEN by Laura Hillenbrand (author of SEABISCUIT) is nonfiction. I’m afraid many readers will miss this book for that reason. They think nonfiction is dull. But I promise, UNBROKEN is not dull. It’s a can’t-put-it-down book that will keep you up at night.

Louie Zamperini was a track star in the 1930s. He was good enough to go to the 1936 Olympics in Germany, and all expected, with more experience, he would be a medalist in the next Olympic games. Instead, World War II interfered, and Louie wa UNBROKEN by Laura Hillenbrand (author of SEABISCUIT) is nonfiction. I’m afraid many readers will miss this book for that reason. They think nonfiction is dull. But I promise, UNBROKEN is not dull. It’s a can’t-put-it-down book that will keep you up at night.

Louie Zamperini was a track star in the 1930s. He was good enough to go to the 1936 Olympics in Germany, and all expected, with more experience, he would be a medalist in the next Olympic games. Instead, World War II interfered, and Louie was drafted into the Army Air Corps.

Then Hillenbrand relates his life as a wartime flier. But Louie’s experiences, even compared with other fliers who saw combat, weren’t typical. Although “war is hell” is true for everyone involved, Louie’s hell was progressively worse. Just when I thought, this is more than a person can take, it got even more hideous.

Somehow, in part because Louie was so physically fit, he kept going. But he wouldn’t have if not for amazing mental strength as well.

If you expect a summary of what happens, I’m sorry. It would be unfair to you. I found the book un-put-downable just because I wasn’t familiar with Louie’s story. I would be doing you a disservice by summarizing the book’s various parts.

Do yourself a favor: don’t read the book flap or other reviews, either, until you’ve read the book yourself.

I can tell you this. UNBROKEN begins with a prologue. Louie and two other men are floating on a rubber raft in the ocean. They’re starving to death and weak when a jet flies low over them. Louie thinks it is American, and they are about to be saved. But it’s not. What happens on that ocean is really bad. But after the prologue and after the story begins with Louie’s early life to his experiences as a runner to the Olympics to the military, it then keeps getting worse.

Even so, I didn’t think this was a depressing book. I’ll admit, sometimes it was hard to read, and, if you’re like me, you may get so caught up in the story you’ll even get a headache at times. I wanted to keep reading because, even though bad kept happening, Louie kept overcoming.

Hillenbrand continues the story after Louie’s military service, and we see his (and others who were with him) ability and inability to cope. We see lives forever changed, often disastrously.

And we also see . . . . Well, I can’t continue without giving away what you should read and not anticipate because of something I said.

Although I read slowly, I read a lot. I usually find one, maybe two, books a year that are so wonderful I can’t speak highly enough of them. This is one of those books.
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Sep 25, 2014 Jessica (Books: A true story) rated it it was amazing

Shelves: kindle, blog, own, amazon, content-high, tbr-2014, ebook-challenge-2015

Short and Sweet Version

Laura Hillenbrand knows how to write a non-fiction memoir that is just as compelling as the best fiction out there. Skip the movie and read Unbroken. This amazing memoir is about the Pacific front of World War II against Japan that most people don't know very much about.

Jessica Thinks Too Much Version

(view spoiler) Short and Sweet Version

Laura Hillenbrand knows how to write a non-fiction memoir that is just as compelling as the best fiction out there. Skip the movie and read Unbroken. This amazing memoir is about the Pacific front of World War II against Japan that most people don't know very much about.

Jessica Thinks Too Much Version

(view spoiler)[

Apparently I have this idea in my head that memoirs are written about perfect people who were born with more strength than the rest of us losers. Maybe that’s true of other memoirs, but it wasn’t true of Unbroken. This memoir doesn't idolize him.

Unbroken was upfront and honest about Louie’s faults, especially about him being a troublemaker as a child. His older brother Pete saw potential in him. Instead of seeing a troublemaker, Pete saw a competitive boy who wanted attention. It was a reminder to me to look for the good in my kids. This morning my oldest son was bossing around his younger brother. Instead of reminding him (again) that he's not in charge of his brother, I saw a young boy who wanted more responsibility. Sometimes all it takes is seeing your weaknesses as strengths. When Louie starts to see that the “bad” qualities he had as a child could help him survive, I was touched.

From earliest childhood, Louie had regarded every limitation placed on him as a challenge to his wits, his resourcefulness, and his determination to rebel. The result had been a mutinous youth. As maddening as his exploits had been for his parents and his town, Louie’s success in carrying them off had given him the conviction that he could think his way around any boundary. Now, as he was cast into extremity, despair and death became the focus of his defiance. The same attributes that had made him the boy terror of Torrance were keeping him alive in the greatest struggle of his life.

-Laura Hillenbrand, Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption (p. 148).

I was floored by how many things Louie survives. Just one of his life events would be enough to turn into an inspiring memoir. Louie survived a plane crash, was lost at sea and almost starved to death (they had food but one guy ate it all), were attacked by sharks while repairing their rubber raft that had holes in it because they were shot at by enemy planes, was a soldier in World War II, and became a prisoner of war with concentration camp conditions in Japan.

When Louie and some of the men at the POW camp were trying to escape, the plan involved going across the sea in a small motor boat. Louie didn't see that as a problem at all compared to drifting 2000 miles in the open ocean with no food. If nothing else, it reminded me that trials can help you say “I've had worse.”

I was surprised how long the story went on after Louie came home from the POW camp. It didn't paint this happily ever after picture. It talked realistically about the physical and emotional scars that Louie and other POW prisoners had the rest of their lives. Louie was rescued physically but the story continued until he was free emotionally as well.

When Laura Hillenbrand first interviewed Louie about his story, the thing that drove her to write this book was to find out how someone could forgive such horrific abuse. Forgiveness is what Unbroken is about. And that’s why the movie sucks because it skims over the forgiveness part of the story. Oh and the fact that the climax in the movie is anti-climatic because even though Louie holds that beam over his head forever the guards beat him with a stick anyway (which does not happen in the book). LET HIM WIN OH MY GOSH. But that’s another post.

The reason Laura Hillenbrand writes such compelling non-fiction is because she knows what NOT to put into her book. I can tell that Laura’s research could easily be thousands of pages long and she has a gift for knowing what to leave out. (This is a gift I need. I feel the need to put every single thought in my book reviews.)

Laura’s selectiveness shines the most for me in her characterization. She gives you one characteristic about each character that is easy to remember and then doesn’t info dump all the other details about the character. It made it so I could say “Oh that’s the guy with the girlfriend at home.” Of course there’s more to the characters than that. As we got to know them through the book, I could attach the new things I learned to that one interesting characteristic so I could keep them all straight.

Another thing that Laura Hillenbrand is beyond talented at is giving the reader a sense of the time period. I loved how she tied all the famous events of the time together with the flight of the Zeppelin. Unbroken helped me learn history by seeing how the world and times affected one person. Laura describes her own writing process better than I could.

You can’t truly understand an individual unless you understand the world he or she inhabits, and in illustrating that individual’s world, you will, hopefully, capture history in the accessible, tactile, authentic way in which the times were actually experienced. In Unbroken as in Seabiscuit, I tried to paint portraits not just of individuals, but of their times.

-Laura Hillenbrand, Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption (Reading Guide)

It wasn’t until reading Unbroken that I realized non-fiction can do something amazing that fiction can’t. Non-fiction can tell you details that people inside the story don’t know. This doesn’t work in fiction because we think the characters are dumb if they don’t know things that we do. But it totally worked in Unbroken because they weren’t dumb - they just couldn’t see everything like we can from this vantage point of looking at these events as the past.

I never realized how little I knew about the Pacific side of World War II until Laura Hillenbrand pointed it out in the interview at the end of the book.

I’m troubled by the fact that when World War II is taught in schools, the lessons focus almost entirely on the European war.

-Laura Hillenbrand, Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption (Reading Guide)

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Mar 20, 2012 Josephine (biblioseph) marked it as tbr-maybe

Shelves: z-added-2011

Recommended to my by my Criminology Prof. He says it's a great argument for something he's not in agreement with. She's a top-notch historian. I'll read it to try and understand why people argue the bombing of Japan was necessary. ...more

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Nov 20, 2013 Casey rated it really liked it

Shelves: veridical, all-around-the-world, knowledge-is-good

This really is an incredible story of life in the midst of World War II. When I think of the second world war, I mostly imagine the war in Europe. After all, most of the books, films, and related cultural narratives focus on Europe. However, the United States was only drawn into the war after an attack made by Japan, and the war didn't actually end until Japan surrendered, so there really should be more of a focus on the Pacific theater, especially in the US.

Hillenbrand's true story of Louis Za ...more

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Jun 20, 2011 Mike rated it it was amazing

Shelves: favorites, 2011

I enjoyed this book a lot more than I thought I would. Louis Zamperini has lived an extraordinary life. His experiences as an airman in WWII were incredible, so harrowing in parts they seem unreal.

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