Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption is a 2010 non-fiction novel by Laura Hillenbrand, author of the best-selling book "Seabiscuit: An American Legend". Unbroken is a biography of World War II hero Louis Zamperini. Source: Wikipedia. The New York Times said this about the book: Zamperini joked to Hillenbrand that he’d be an easier subject for her than Seabiscuit because he could talk. But that also presents perils. Though his wartime experiences faded with time, talking about them was pretty much all Zamperini did for years. From more than a thousand retellings, in newspaper and radio interviews and in inspirational speeches — “This Is Your Life” even devoted an episode to him — his story had been sanded down, and while Hillenbrand ably assembles its component parts, she rarely gets beneath the surface. That Zamperini does not seem especially introspective and may have forgotten or repressed certain memories only compounds the problem.
The Statesman had this to say about the author and book: Hillenbrand is careful not to demonize all of the Japanese guards; parts of her account of Zamperini's time as a POW are based on interviews with former Japanese soldiers at the camps who were clearly disturbed at the time by the goings-on. Yet it's hard to sugarcoat some of the incidents she relates. Zamperini was made to clean out a pig's sty with his hands. (He was so hungry that he shoved some of the pig's befouled feed in his mouth.) He was lined up with other officers and hit in the face by the enlisted men at the orders of guards, who finished off the beatings with a kendo stick after two hours of hitting. Like many of the other prisoners, he suffered from dysentery, at one point visiting the latrine as many as 20 times a day.
This book is one everyone needs to read. It's an unbelievable story of survival. Learning the history of WWII through the character's story was almost hard to imagine but so necessary to read. I can't wait to read her next novel.
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