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

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.

Rajiv Chandrasekaran: Imperial Life in the Emerald City: Inside Iraq's Green Zone

Thomas Ricks is a Pulitzer Prize winning reporter that used to work for the Wall Street Journal. He now blogs for Foreign Policy and is a fellow scholar at the Center for a New American Security, a defense policy and military think tank. Recently, on NPR's Forum with Michael Krasny, he picked his top 5 books about the war in Iraq, and listed the author Rajiv Chandrasekaran and his book Imperial Life in the Emerald City as his favorite. Now, the business and marketing around these interesting books or book is odd. The Kindle version of the book is marketed as the Green Zone, while the original hardcover of course retains its original title (just in case that throws you off at the bookstore; check for both titles). Author Rajiv Chandrasekaran writes and edits for the Washington Post, and recently wrote "The Longest War: Afghan Strategy's Proving Ground." Imperial Life in the Emerald City: Inside Iraq's Green Zone [DECKLE EDGE] (Hardcover) won the Samuel Johnson Prize in 2007 and was a finalist for the 2006 National Book Awards for non-fiction. Other interesting books about the war in Iraq: Love My Rifle More than You: Young and Female in the U.S. Army, One Bullet Away: The Making of a Marine Officer, House to House: An Epic Memoir of War.

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Serbia Sending its Nuclear Waste Back to Russia from The Takeaway: Early Edition

Serbia has sent 2.5 tons of its remaining nuclear waste, including highly-enriched uranium from a nuclear research facility near Belgrade, to a disposal site in Russia. The month-long secret operation was the largest single shipment made to return such nuclear material to the country where it originally came from. However, details of the route are classified to prevent terrorists from hijacking the cargo.The BBC's Gordon Corera discusses what he saw as the only journalist allowed on its route.

View The Takeaway webpage on this story, here. Download the podcast of this story, here. Gordon Corera regularly publishes on the BBC regarding various nuclear threats and security issues. His latest report is "A secret journey to take Serbian nuclear fuel to safety." Find that report here. See also: The Secret Service.

American Values: Freedom from The Takeaway: Early Edition by feedback@thetakeaway.org (Public Radio International and WNYC Radio)

We frequently hear the term “values” discussed with regard to American politics, culture and life. But what are "American values?" All week, we’re delving into this question. Yesterday we discussed home ownership. Today we wrap up our series with a look at freedom. How did freedom come to be an American Value? If we value freedom so much, why have we spent so much of our nation’s history enslaving our own people, or oppressing those in other nations? And what does Freedom mean to Americans today? Joining us is Gene Clem, president of the Southwest Michigan Tea Party Patriots, who shares what freedom means to him, along with Eric Foner, a professor of history at Columbia University, and author of “The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln” and “American Slavery: The Story of American Freedom.”

Download the podcast here. Also by Foner: Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877, The Story of American Freedom, Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men: The Ideology of the Republican Party before the Civil War With a New Introductory Essay, Give Me Liberty!: An American History, Second Seagull Edition, Volume 2. Many of the token African American Republicans, mistakenly point to Lincoln as their inspiration for joining the GOP. But here's the problem, Foner notes that the GOP "could not be more different. Lincoln in 1860 did not receive a single vote in most of the southern states. His Republican party was the party of opposition to the expansion of slavery and later of emancipation, and a strong federal government protecting the civil and political rights of black Americans. Today the party's center of gravity is in the South, it opposes most federal initiatives (except defense) and is the inheritor of Richard Nixon's "southern strategy" aimed almost exclusively at white voters." He said this in an interview on CNN; find that Q&A here.



The Washington Post had this to say about the Foner's book:

What gives the book its major spurt of energy and freshness is its account of the complicated political and social context in which Lincoln's views on slavery were formed and the large number of people and movements that helped create the dominant attitudes toward slavery in early and mid-19th-century America. The book "is intended to be both less and more than another biography," Foner claims in his preface. Actually, it's not a biography at all. It is different from a biography, and consequently neither "less" nor "more."

You can find that WP article here.

"'The Gun': How AK-47s Changed The Nature Of War" - from NPR News and the NPR program, All Things Considered

The image is iconic: the stubby barrel, the inverted arc of the banana clip. Osama bin Laden included one in his video after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. Saddam Hussein had a pair with him when he was captured. It appears on the flag of Mozambique and Hezbollah. The AK-47 — or versions of it — can be found in every major conflict of the past 50 years. In his new book, The Gun, Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter C.J. Chivers traces the history of the lethal firearm. Chivers, a foreign correspondent for The New York Times, tells NPR's Audie Cornish the gun is one of the principle weapons of insurgents in Afghanistan, where he's been reporting.

Download the podcast here. Read the full NPR All Things Considered feature story, here. Newsday posted a few pages of the book, here. And The New York Times had this to say about the book, recently:

It is no accident that C. J. Chivers opens “The Gun,” his bold history of the AK-47, not with the loud crack that is the report of the rifle but with the monstrous bang of the first detonation of a Soviet nuclear bomb. As Mr. Chivers’s detailed history then skirts as far back as the United States Civil War and brings us right up to the current conflict in Afghanistan, the message of his prologue is clear: For all that the escalating cold war shaped the last 60 years, no one was ever killed in conflict by a Russian nuke. By contrast untold millions have been wounded and killed by the AK-47 and related weapons, as they have proliferated and mutated from tools of engineering ingenuity, honestly wrought in defense of the socialist motherland, to the firearm of choice for both oppressor and oppressed.

Find that Times piece, here. The Los Angeles Times also plugs the book:

If somebody were to tell you that the long tragedy of human warfare entered a new and deadly phase in the fourth decade of the 20th century, the historically literate mind almost certainly would jump to the invention of the atomic bomb, which ushered in an age of anxiety and the long balance of terror between the United States and the Soviet Union. C.J. Chivers makes a convincing case in "The Gun" that a far more lethal and consequential weapon was devised at about that same time in a sprawling Soviet military design facility — the first Avtomat (Automatic) Kalashnikov assault rifle. "The Gun" is the author's exhaustive history of the rifle's origins, development and astonishing influence on global security. The banana-clipped Kalashnikov is by now a familiar sight to anyone who watches a few minutes of television news footage; it's the weapon clasped to the chests of Kim Jong Il's goose-stepping legions, waved high by Somali pirates, clutched by Africa's wretched child soldiers, leaning up against a mud-washed wall in Osama bin Laden's infamous videos.

You can find the Los Angeles Times mention, here (it's a few paragraphs; nothing meaty). And the New York Post had this to say about The Gun:

In his fascinating book, “The Gun” (Simon & Schuster), Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist C.J. Chivers shows how the world was forever altered by the pursuit of automatic weapons and especially the invention of the Kalashnikov — an easy-to-use automatic rifle that allowed any one man to possess the firepower of an army.

Finally, for a little over a year now, Chivers has been maintaining this blog at The New York Times. The blog's central theme is war and small arms. And on that note, there's a pairing that we can do here, though not with another book; a 2005 film starring Nicholas Cage, "Lord of War." The movie's theme is closely aligned with the sentiments in Chivers' book, and it's hard to not think of the movie, while reading the book, and vice versa; mainly because of the weight of the AK-47, the credit and the responsibility that's placed on this sole item. IMDB carries this storyline description:

This film charts the rise and fall of Yuri Orlov, from his early days in the early 1980s in Little Odessa, selling guns to mobsters in his local neighbourhood, through to his ascension through the decade of excess and indulgence into the early 90s, where he forms a business partnership with an African warlord and his psychotic son. The film also charts his relationship through the years with his younger brother, his marriage to a famous model, his relentless pursuit by a determined federal agent and his inner demons that sway between his drive for success and the immorality of what he does.

Find the that IMDB profile here. Wikipedia has this to say, about the film's historical accuracy:

Plot details on the illegal arms market, particularly regarding purchases for Tropical Africa in early 1990s, are closely based on real stories and people originating from the former Soviet Union. The main protagonist's name, Yuri Orlov, corresponds to the last name of Oleg Orlov, a Russian businessman arrested in Ukraine on suspicion of smuggling missiles to Iran. The real Orlov was strangled in Kiev's Lukyanivska Prison in 2007 during the investigation.[7] The character Andre Baptiste, Sr. is partly based on Charles Taylor, the President of Liberia until 2003.[8] The character of Colonel Oliver Southern is evidently hinting of Oliver North, most famous for his involvement in the Iran-Contra Scandal. However, the scenes of direct shipping of weapons from Ukraine's army storages is fictional.[7] Portrayal of the Interpol as an acting security agency is also entirely fictional.

Amnesty International supported and endorsed the film. There's an internet movie firearms database, the IMFDB (sort of like the IMDB, no relation). The site lists all of the firearms, along with the AK-47, that were featured in the film.

The Daily Show - December 6, 2010 - Hugh Shelton

December 06, 2010 - Hugh Shelton Views: 186,486 Aired: 12/06/10 Episode 15154 Tulsa renames its holiday parade, and Hugh Shelton discusses civilian control of the military.

View the full episode here. See also: Without Hesitation: The Odyssey of an American Warrior, Secrets of Success: North Carolina Values-Based Leadership, The Fourth Star: Four Generals and the Epic Struggle for the Future of the United States Army, by Gen. Hugh Shelton (Author), Ronald Levinson (Author), Malcolm McConnell (Author) Without Hesitation [Abridged, Audiobook, CD] [Audio CD], Known and Unknown: A Memoir

How the AK-47 Changed the World from The Takeaway: Early Edition by feedback@thetakeaway.org (Public Radio International and WNYC Radio)

The AK-47 has long been synonymous with armed combat at both large and small scale, and for good reason. The gun has remained the most widely-deployed assault rifle in the world for decades. Compact, efficient and reliable in the field, the gun releases fifteen rounds from its barrel in a single second – allowing users to annihilate their enemies with the single touch of a trigger. Of course, this also means that millions have died at the hands of those who operate AK-47s. The United Nations estimates that four million people died by small arms in the 1990s alone, ninety percent of them civilians. How did the AK-47 become the go-to assault rifle? Who first developed it? And how has the world changed since it was first used? C.J. Chivers explores these questions in his new book, “The Gun: The AK-47 and the Evolution of War.” Chivers is a New York Times senior writer, former Marine Corps officer and Moscow bureau chief.

Listen to the whole show here, or you can download an mp3 copy of it here.