Unbroken: Laura Hillenbrand’s Story of Louis Zamperini’s Survival and Forgiveness
By telling the unforgettable story of one man’s journey to the extreme, Unbroken is a testament to the resilience of the human mind, body and spirit. Laura Hillenbrand’s 2010 biography of Louis Zamperini became a No. 1 New York Times bestseller and the basis of two films.
Author: Laura Hillenbrand
Title: Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption (2010)
Format: English paperback (Random House), 528 pages
Scope: Biography of Olympic runner and airman Louis Zamperini
Amazon: www.amazon.es/dp/0812974492 (ASIN 0812974492)
From Troubled Boy to Olympian
Louis Zamperini was an Italian-American boy with a difficult childhood whose talent for running took him to the 1936 Olympic Games in Berlin. The athlete later joined the US Army Air Forces during the Second World War.
Adrift and Captured
In 1943 the bomber he was flying in crashed into the Pacific, and he drifted at sea for more than a month. He was captured by the Japanese and spent the rest of the war as a prisoner, an experience that pushed him to the limit again and again. Hillenbrand reconstructs those years in painstaking detail, and the result reads with the tension of a novel, though every page is true.
The Bird
In the Japanese prison camps, Zamperini became the particular target of Mutsuhiro Watanabe, a guard the prisoners called "the Bird". Watanabe singled out the famous Olympian for relentless beatings and humiliation. Hillenbrand describes this ordeal in painful detail, and it explains why the war did not end for Zamperini when he came home.
After the War
Back in the United States he suffered nightmares, drank heavily and nearly destroyed his marriage, obsessed with returning to Japan to kill his tormentor. The turning point came in 1949, when his wife persuaded him to attend a Billy Graham crusade in Los Angeles. He gave up drinking, became a Christian speaker and later travelled to Japan to meet and forgive former guards. Few biographies have such a complete arc from suffering to peace.
How Hillenbrand Wrote It
Laura Hillenbrand, already known for Seabiscuit (2001), lives with chronic fatigue syndrome, which for long periods kept her from travelling. She researched Unbroken through archives and many hours of interviews with Zamperini himself, conducted largely by phone. The result reads like a thriller but rests on meticulous research. Angelina Jolie directed a film version in 2014, released a few months after Zamperini’s death at the age of 97.
Who Should Read It
Readers of war history, sports stories or biographies of resilience, and anyone going through a hard time. It is long, but it moves quickly.
Forty-Seven Days
The raft chapters are among the most gripping in modern non-fiction. After their bomber crashed into the Pacific in 1943, Zamperini and pilot Russell Allen Phillips survived for 47 days, drinking rainwater, catching birds and fish with their hands, and fighting off sharks; the third survivor, Francis McNamara, died before they reached land. They drifted some 2,000 miles only to be captured by the Japanese in the Marshall Islands, where a new ordeal began.
Forgiveness
After his release and return to the United States, his life took another difficult turn before he found a way forward. In 1950 he travelled to Japan in an act of reconciliation, and he reaffirmed it in 1998 by carrying the Olympic torch at the Winter Games in Nagano, Japan. It is a story of overcoming and resilience.
The book won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for biography and was adapted by Angelina Jolie as the 2014 film Unbroken. Read it for the survival epic, and stay for the harder, quieter victory at the end.
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