Unbroken Review by Emma

This fall, I read the book Unbroken by Laura Hillenbrand, a nonfiction biography of an Olympic runner named Louis Zamperini who served as a bomber in the Air Force during World War II. I read this book off of several recommendations from friends and family but was a little doubtful about starting it, since it seemed pretty long and dry. Surprisingly, I found it both an interesting read and a well-written, fascinating story.

(This summary includes spoilers all the way to the end of the book, but this is a nonfiction biography/history book.) The book opens by describing Louis’ childhood, where he was a well-known troublemaker in the small California town where he grew up. He was pushed into joining the track team at his local high school and soon discovered his talent for running, which took him all the way to the 1936 Berlin Olympics. Soon after, he enlisted in the Air Force in the Pacific Theatre during World War II, where he went on bombing missions from the island Funafuti. During one mission, his faulty plane crashed over the open ocean, killing the whole crew except for him and two other crewmates. The three of them were stranded in the Pacific on the plane’s emergency life rafts for nearly a month and a half, surviving primarily on rainwater, fish, and small birds. Louis and the other crew member that survived their time on the life raft eventually washed ashore on a Japanese-occupied island atoll and taken as prisoners of war, where they were subjected to the horrible conditions of the Japanese POW camps, including starvation and disease, physical and mental abuse, and hard labor, with Louis in particular singled out by one of the Japanese guards. After the end of the war, he returned home to California, and despite receiving a lot of publicity, was severely traumatized and began drinking frequently to cope. The book leaves off after a turning point in Louis’ post-war life, when he discovered religion as a way to start over clean and try to move on in life.

Overall, this book was really interesting, and brought up some thought-provoking themes. One example of this that comes into play throughout the book is the overall theme of persistence and resilience. These are qualities that Louis possesses in abundance, and the book shows how they help him make it through these incredible ordeals without giving up or losing hope. A second theme that becomes important near the end of the story is forgiving others and making fresh starts. Despite all of the hardships Louis went through, he chose to publicly forgive all of the Japanese guards and officers who mistreated him while he was in the POW camps, even though the trauma he had gone through there had made a huge impact on his life. These themes both tie together the various parts of Louis’ life into a concrete story and make the book really inspirational. 

There are a few things I’d warn someone thinking of reading this book about. First of all, it’s fairly detailed in many parts, and spends a lot of time establishing the backstories of the various people in the book and describing the political background of the war at various times throughout the book, so I probably wouldn’t recommend it to someone who likes fast-paced books or isn’t that interested in history. Something else I’d warn possible readers about, and wish I had been warned about myself is that the book gives detailed descriptions of some of the violence and abuse that the POWs went through, and some parts can be hard to read for that reason. Other than these issues, though, I enjoyed Unbroken, and would recommend it to almost anyone looking for a history or biography book!