Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption

If I can finish a book that is over 400 pages in two sittings, then Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption is a must read for anyone even remotely interested in the immigrant experience, WWII, specifically the Pacific theater and veteran life post war. If you saw the movie, you must read the book. Any segment of the book would have made an excellent movie, but it was a serious mistake to try to make one movie about Louis Zamperini’s life.
Since Hollywood has a penchant for trilogies, Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption should have been shot in three parts. The first part would be about the prejudice faced by the immigrant family and how Zamperini eventually transformed his reaction to it from juvenile delinquent to rascal Olympian. The second part would be about WWII: being stranded in the middle of the Pacific Ocean and as a POW. The third part would be about emerging from an alcohol soaked anger fueled PTSD to the wonderful man that he became who was willing to forgive those who trespassed against him and became a beacon to other lost boys. Angelina Jolie would not direct any of these films.
If anyone says that slavery wasn’t too bad, I would hand them Lauren Hilenbrand’s Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption and turn to page 189. One POW said, “I was literally becoming a lesser human being.” Hillenbrand explains, “Louie and Phil learned a dark truth known to the doomed in Hitler’s death camps, the slaves of the American South, and a hundred other generations of betrayed people. Dignity is essential to human life as water, food and oxygen. The stubborn retention of it, even in the face of extreme physical hardship, can hold a man’s soul in his body long past the point at which the body should have surrendered it. The loss of it can carry a man off as surely as thirst, hunger, exposure, and asphyxiation, and with greater cruelty.” Few men would know this fact as well as Louie who survived starvation and thirst in the open Pacific Ocean better than he fared under the cruel treatment of most of his Japanese captors.
Hillenbrad’s Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption is so good that I may finally dust off Seabiscuit, which has been sitting on my shelf for years, and read it.