Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption by
Laura Hillenbrand (2010)
Let me just say up front that I loved Laura Hillenbrand’s
Seabiscuit. It is probably my favorite nonfiction book. Well, I think, she’s done it again with
Unbroken, the biography of an extraordinary U.S. Army Air Force officer,
Louie Zamperini, who was shot down over the Pacific. Laura Hillenbrand has presented a remarkable story of human endurance. Zamperini’s story, like Seabiscuit’s, is eternal and inspirational.
On a mission over the South Pacific, Zamperini was the bombardier on a B-24. When the plane crashes, he finds himself floating on a raft with little provision for survival. After more than a month on the raft, starving, thirsty and chased by sharks, the ordeal ends with the survivors being captured by the Japanese and imprisoned in a hellish Japanese POW camp.
Hillenbrand is an historian and biographer who places herself at the service of her subjects; this makes her books a rare combination of writer and story. Though her prose is short and straightforward, her books are written with a rich and vivid narrative voice that keeps you involved through even the worst of Zamperini’s ordeal.
Read an excerpt of the book
here.