Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption
One of the things I find myself doing - and trying to stop doing while I'm doing it - is to imagine a book I'm reading as movie. It can be a fun exercise, and to some degree imagining a book in one's head isn't all that far off from seeing it on a screen. Certain writers -- mostly ones I don't enjoy reading - essentially disguise screenplays as novels, while others simply describe characters, landscape and events so clearly and brilliantly, one can't help but direct the scene.
Laura Hillenbrand is such a writer - her first book was Seabiscuit, a simply amazing detail of the Great Depression and the racehorse - a book I loved so entirely that I was shocked by:
a) How crappy the movie turned out to be.
b) How many people loved that crappy movie.
Hillenbrand's latest book takes place around World War II, focusing not on a horse, but a human: Louis Zamperini. Once a thug, Zamperini refocused and became an Olympic runner, alongside teammate Jesse Owens in the Berlin 1936 Games. After the U.S. entered the war, Zamperini became a bombadier in the Pacific theater. The reader knows - from the opening passage, as well as an description of the story - that Zamperini is at some point lost at sea after a crash, surrounded by sharks and spotted by the Japanese.
So ... there's that.
Hillenbrand then rewinds and brings us to that moment by detailing Zamperini's childhood - described elegantly and vividly, Zamperini (or, simply, Louis as he's referenced through the book) starts off life as a massively energetic, often thuggish, delinquent kid. His brother Pete, a runner himself, decides Louis will not only succeed at running but be reformed by it, and this proves true as Louis was good - Olympian athlete good. But all of this, as well told as it is, pales to the story once war begins.
This is Louis Zamperini, and he's way tougher than us.Zamperini is a bombardier, flying missions that were almost insanely fraught with risk. The statistics Hillenbrand places are horrifying and crazy; close to 29,000 planes were lost due not to combat, but to accidents and over 50,000 airmen died in training and the war due to noncombat accidents. Add in the obvious real risks of combat itself, and the job was one of the most dangerous in all of the war.
As foretold in the opening segment, Zamperini does crash, surviving it along with his close friend and pilot Russell Allen "Phil" Phillips, and the tailgunner Mac. They survive on the raft for an unheard of time (truly) and do so through desperate but ingenious methods, mostly of Zamperini's design.
And then, they are "rescued" by the Japanese and put into POW camp.
What's insane about Unbroken is that as crazy and insane the "castaway" portion of the story is, it gets more horrifying. The abuses waged against Zamperini's body and mind and his fellow captives are devastating in their totality. And as it becomes more unbelievable, it is instantly reinforced that it MUST be believable because this all happened. The fact that someone like "The Bird" existed is both repugnant and somewhat incredible, because if this were fiction, you'd find his behavior over the top, unbelievable and potentially an offensive depiction.
As hard as it would be to create a realistic looking month-plus at sea with actors wasting away to almost nothing, it might be harder to successfully pull off the horrors that Hillenbrand details here. I rather hoped that nobody even attempt to turn this into a film -- but ... of course it's already are in the works. Sigh.
Without going further in the story, it's finally worth stating that the story ends on a scale that was both suprising and satisfying. The book is gripping, powerful and at times, as one might expect, emotional and inspiring. I knew nothing of Louis Zamperini, or that he'd once been a national hero. He still is one, and should be celebrated as such. Laura Hillenbrand has written another spectacular book, one I simply can't recommend enough.
Rating: 9.5/10.0