Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption by Laura Hillenbrand.

4/5 rating. 398 pages.

Book #40 of 2022. Read November 7, 2022.

This book tells the incredible true story of Louis Zamperini, a WWII POW who was once one of the fastest people alive.

Louis ran track at USC, went to the Olympics and nearly had one of the most impossible comebacks in running history. Many believe that he would have been the first person to ever eclipse a 4-minute mile. Unfortunately, WWII got in the way of that. Louis ended up flying for the air force in the war.

His life just continued to get more unreal as his plane went down over the Pacific and he was one of 3 survivors. You end up reading the book and are only halfway through when Louis and the only other survivor of one of the longest times to be lost at sea are rescued. Unfortunately, he is picked up by the Japanese and becomes a POW.

His treatment as a POW can hardly be imagined as it is a miracle that any person can suffer through so much pain and torture and still live. Louie’s story is a testament to human resilience and is just an incredible story. Laura does such a good job bringing the whole tale to life.

Some quotes:

“At a prom in Terre Haute, Allen kissed Cecy. He was a goner, and so was she.”

“Life was cheap in war.”

“This self-respect and sense of self-worth, the innermost armament of the soul, lies at the heart of humanness; to be deprived of it is to be dehumanized, to be cleaved from, and cast below, mankind.”

“On Kwajalein, 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 as 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.”

This book is fantastic and I would recommend it to anyone!

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