I spent the winter holiday traveling – I flew to Africa and with some of my family, hiked to the summit of Mt. Kilimanjaro. There was no listening to books on the mountain, but I did work my way through one of the Game of Thrones paperbacks – now I ready to watch the TV show. However, exciting at those books are, I will not be reviewing them. Side Note – Kilimanjaro was amazing and definitely harder than I anticipated. But the view from the top at sunrise, the experience, the people of Africa, and the time with my brothers was absolutely worth it.

Instead, once I returned to Cambridge, I listened to Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption by Laura Hillenbrand. This is the story of Louis Zamperini. Zamperini grew up in a family that knew poverty – he spent his youth leading shenanigans, stealing food, and living for pranks. This often led to him being chased and his running into the night to escape his victims, his teachers, and the police. He realized he could run, and began to run competitively in high school (with his older brother chasing him on a bike and smacking him with a switch when he slowed down…). Louis was fast, and began to win, and soon became a fanatic. After setting a record for the fastest high school mile time ever recorded before, he won a scholarship to USC, and began to think about the 1936 Olympics. Not yet fast enough to compete in the 1500 meter event (they didn’t have a mile event), he took a crash course in longer runs and won a spot on the US team in the 5000 meter event.

At the Olympics, Zamperini was far slower than many of the athletes from other countries (he did gorge himself for many days on the free food on the trip overseas…on the same trip that the rowers I mentioned in a previous review below were on), but put on a daring show and in his last lap, he flew through much of the competition and finished 8^th. Louis’ last lap even caught the eye of Adolf Hitler and he was invited to meet him in the stands later. Always the prankster, he would later get caught trying to steal a Nazi flag, and managed to talk his way out of it and keep the flag.

Once the war started, Louis chose to join the Army Air Corps and worked his way to becoming a bombardier (the book includes a litany of well-placed statistics, including the foreshadowing fact that 70% of the war’s 52,000+ Air Corps casualties came from accidents and not from combat fatalities). He played a key role in numerous successful and daring missions in the South Pacific. However, Zamperini was part of a search and rescue mission on a probably-defective plane, the Green Hornet, in 1943. The Green Hornet suffered mechanical difficulties and crashed 850 miles from land. Only 3 of the 11 crew members survived. Zamperini, along with Francis MacNamara and his close friend Allen Phillips, would drift for 47 days with virtually no food and very little water in two open yellow rafts (MacNamara died at sea after 33 days). On the 47^th day, as they sighted land and struggled to row to an island, they were captured by the Japanese Navy.

The story is good up to this point, but once they are captured, Hillenbrand makes you feel as if you are alongside them. She takes you through the pain, the suffering, the beatings, the agony, the disease, the starvation, the slavery, the anger, the resentment, and the unbearableness of what these prisoners suffered (all in complete violation of the Geneva Convention – which Japan signed but had not yet ratified). The villain of the book is a man named Matsuhiro ‘the Bird’ Watanabe, who physically and consistently tortures the prisoners under his control. Zamperini, an American celebrity, got the worst of it. At points, despite his enfeebled state, he is forced to race various people in Japan and offered extra food and other incentives to lose. Even though he is vastly undernourished and has problems standing, he still sometimes wins and finds way to inspire his fellow POWs. Hillenbrand brings his sense of defiance and his will to live to life.

Louis and Phillips both survive the war and make it home, but for Louis, his war rages on as he falls into alcoholism and a thirst for revenge over his former captor. Hillenbrand sums up the spirit succinctly – “The paradox of vengefulness is that it makes men dependent on those who have harmed them, believing that their release from pain will come only when they make their tormentors suffer. In seeking the Bird’s death to free himself, Louis had chained himself once again to his tyrant.” But instead of murder, he finds his salvation at a revival tent meeting with Billy Graham and becomes an inspirational Christian speaker for the rest of his life. Zamperini eventually returns to Japan and forgives his former guards, all except for the Bird, who has disappeared. He surfaced years later, but when Louis tried to meet with him in the late 1990’s, the Bird refused to see him.

To put it simply, this Unbroken was a pleasure to listen to. I enjoyed it, and I learned from it. Never once did I get bored or want to turn it off or switch to music. Zamperini’s fight to live and ability to keep going was inspirational. But as the book shows, he is not perfect – his despair and thirst for revenge (fueled by alcohol) shows how we can all fall. The only thing I would have liked added to this book would be a little bit more reflection on his post-war life; the book makes it seem that after his conversion to Christianity, his life became perfect, and I am sure there was more too it. Score: 9.0.

Another side note: Laura Hillenbrand has chronic fatigue syndrome and rarely leaves her home. She does almost all her interviews via phone, but still put together and chronicled this amazing story. Definitely looking forward to the movie coming out on Netflix.