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

Chapter One The One-Boy Insurgency\ In the predawn darkness of August 26, 1929, in the back bedroom of a small house inTorrance, California, a twelve-year-old boy sat up in bed, listening. There was a sound coming from outside, growing ever louder. It was a huge, heavy rush, suggesting immensity, a great parting of air. It was coming from directly above the house. The boy swung his legs off his bed, raced down the stairs, slapped open the back door, and loped onto the grass. The yard was otherworldly, smothered in unnatural darkness, shivering with sound. The boy stood on the lawn beside his older brother, head thrown back, spellbound.\ The sky had disappeared. An object that he could see only in silhouette, reaching across a massive arc of space, was suspended low in theair over the house. It was longer than two and a half football fields and as tall as a city. It was putting out the stars.\ What he saw was the German dirigible Graf Zeppelin. At nearly 800 feet long and 110 feet high, it was the largest flying machine evercrafted. More luxurious than the finest airplane, gliding effortlessly over huge distances, built on a scale that left spectators gasping, it was, in the summer of '29, the wonder of the world.\ The airship was three days from completing a sensational feat of aeronautics, circumnavigation of the globe. The journey had begun onAugust 7, when the Zeppelin had slipped its tethers in Lakehurst, New Jersey, lifted up with a long, slow sigh, and headed for Manhattan. On Fifth Avenue that summer, demolition was soon to begin on the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel, clearing the way for a skyscraper of unprecedented proportions, the Empire State Building. At Yankee Stadium, in the Bronx, players were debuting numbered uniforms: Lou Gehrig wore No. 4; Babe Ruth, about to hit his five hundredth home run, wore No. 3. On Wall Street, stock prices were racing toward an all-time high.\ After a slow glide around the Statue of Liberty, the Zeppelin banked north, then turned out over the Atlantic. In time, land came below again: France, Switzerland, Germany. The ship passed over Nuremberg, where fringe politician Adolf Hitler, whose Nazi Party had been trounced in the 1928 elections, had just delivered a speech touting selective infanticide. Then it flew east of Frankfurt, where a Jewish woman named Edith Frank was caring for her newborn, a girl named Anne. Sailing northeast, the Zeppelin crossed over Russia. Siberian villagers, so isolated that they'd never even seen a train, fell to their knees at the sight of it.\ On August 19, as some four million Japanese waved handkerchiefs and shouted "Banzai!" the Zeppelin circled Tokyo and sank onto a landing field. Four days later, as the German and Japanese anthems played, the ship rose into the grasp of a typhoon that whisked it over the Pacific at breathtaking speed, toward America. Passengers gazing from the windows saw only the ship's shadow, following it along the clouds "like a huge shark swimming alongside." When the clouds parted, the passengers glimpsed giant creatures, turning in the sea, that looked like monsters.\ On August 25, the Zeppelin reached San Francisco. After being cheered down the California coast, it slid through sunset, into darkness and silence, and across midnight. As slow as the drifting wind, it passed over Torrance, where its only audience was a scattering of drowsy souls, among them the boy in his pajamas behind the house on Gramercy Avenue.\ Standing under the airship, his feet bare in the grass, he was transfixed. It was, he would say, "fearfully beautiful." He could feel the rumble of the craft's engines tilling the air but couldn't make out the silver skin, the sweeping ribs, the finned tail. He could see only the blackness of the space it inhabited. It was not a great presence but a great absence, a geometric ocean of darkness that seemed to swallow heaven itself.\ The boy's name was Louis Silvie Zamperini. The son of Italian immigrants, he had come into the world in Olean, New York, on January 26, 1917, eleven and a half pounds of baby under black hair as coarse as barbed wire. His father, Anthony, had been living on his own since age fourteen, first as a coal miner and boxer, then as a construction worker. His mother, Louise, was a petite, playful beauty, sixteen at marriage and eighteen when Louie was born. In their apartment, where only Italian was spoken, Louise and Anthony called their boy Toots.\ From the moment he could walk, Louie couldn't bear to be corralled. His siblings would recall him careening about, hurdling flora, fauna, and furniture. The instant Louise thumped him into a chair and told him to be still, he vanished. If she didn't have her squirming boy clutched in her hands, she usually had no idea where he was.\ In 1919, when two-year-old Louie was down with pneumonia, he climbed out his bedroom window, descended one story, and went on a naked tear down the street with a policeman chasing him and a crowd watching in amazement. Soon after, on a pediatrician's advice, Louise and Anthony decided to move their children to the warmer climes of California. Sometime after their train pulled out of Grand Central Station, Louie bolted, ran the length of the train, and leapt from the caboose. Standing with his frantic mother as the train rolled backward in search of the lost boy, Louie's older brother, Pete, spotted Louie strolling up the track in perfect serenity. Swept up in his mother's arms, Louie smiled. "I knew you'd come back," he said in Italian.\ In California, Anthony landed a job as a railway electrician and bought a half-acre field on the edge of Torrance, population 1,800. He and Louise hammered up a one-room shack with no running water, an outhouse behind, and a roof that leaked so badly that they had to keep buckets on the beds. With only hook latches for locks, Louise took to sitting by the front door on an apple box with a rolling pin in her hand, ready to brain any prowlers who might threaten her children.\ There, and at the Gramercy Avenue house where they settled a year later, Louise kept prowlers out, but couldn't keep Louie in hand. Contesting a footrace across a busy highway, he just missed getting broadsided by a jalopy. At five, he started smoking, picking up discarded cigarette butts while walking to kindergarten. He began drinking one night when he was eight; he hid under the dinner table, snatched glasses of wine, drank them all dry, staggered outside, and fell into a rosebush.\ On one day, Louise discovered that Louie had impaled his leg on a bamboo beam; on another, she had to ask a neighbor to sew Louie's severed toe back on. When Louie came home drenched in oil after scaling an oil rig, diving into a sump well, and nearly drowning, it took a gallon of turpentine and a lot of scrubbing before Anthony recognized his son again. Thrilled by the crashing of boundaries, Louie was untamable. As he grew into his uncommonly clever mind, mere feats of daring were no longer satisfying. In Torrance, a one-boy insurgency was born.\ If it was edible, Louie stole it. He skulked down alleys, a roll of lock-picking wire in his pocket. Housewives who stepped from their kitchens would return to find that their suppers had disappeared. Residents looking out their back windows might catch a glimpse of a long-legged boy dashing down the alley, a whole cake balanced on his hands. When a local family left Louie off their dinner-party guest list, he broke into their house, bribed their Great Dane with a bone, and cleaned out their icebox. At another party,he absconded with an entire keg of beer. When he discovered that the cooling tables at Meinzer's Bakery stood within an arm's length of the back door, he began picking the lock, snatching pies, eating until he was full, and reserving the rest as ammunition for ambushes. When rival thieves took up the racket, he suspended the stealing until the culprits were caught and the bakery owners dropped their guard. Then he ordered his friends to rob Meinzer's again.\ It is a testament to the content of Louie's childhood that his stories about it usually ended with "...and then I ran like mad." He was often chased by people he had robbed, and at least two people threatened to shoot him. To minimize the evidence found on him when the police habitually came his way, he set up loot-stashing sites around town, including a three-seater cave that he dug in a nearby forest. Under the Torrance High bleachers, Pete once found a stolen wine jug that Louie had hidden there. It was teeming with inebriated ants. In the lobby of the Torrance theater, Louie stopped up the pay telephone's coin slots with toilet paper. He returned regularly to feedwire behind the coins stacked up inside, hook the paper, and fill his palms with change. A metal dealer never guessed that the grinning Italian kid who often came by to sell him armfuls of copper scrap had stolen the same scrap from his lot the night before. Discovering, while scuffling with an enemy at a circus, that adults would give quarters to fighting kids to pacify them, Louie declared a truce with the enemy and they cruised around staging brawls before strangers.\ To get even with a railcar conductor who wouldn't stop for him, Louie greased the rails. When a teacher made him stand in a corner for spitballing, he deflated her car tires with toothpicks. After setting a legitimate Boy Scout state record in friction-fire ignition, he broke his record by soaking his tinder in gasoline and mixing it with match heads, causing a small explosion. He stole a neighbor's coffee percolator tube, set up a sniper's nest in a tree, crammed pepper-tree berries into his mouth, spat them through the tube, and sent the neighborhood girls running.\ His magnum opus became legend. Late one night, Louie climbed the steeple of a Baptist church, rigged the bell with piano wire, strung the wire into a nearby tree, and roused the police, the fire department, and all of Torrance with apparently spontaneous pealing. The more credulous townsfolk called it a sign from God.\ Only one thing scared him. When Louie was in late boyhood, a pilot landed a plane near Torrance and took Louie up for a flight. One might have expected such an intrepid child to be ecstatic, but the speed and altitude frightened him. From that day on, he wanted nothing to do with airplanes.\ In a childhood of artful dodging, Louie made more than just mischief. He shaped who he would be in manhood. Confident that he was clever, resourceful, and bold enough to escape any predicament, he was almost incapable of discouragement. When history carried him into war, this resilient optimism would define him.\ Louie was twenty months younger than his brother, who was everything he was not. Pete Zamperini was handsome, popular, impeccably groomed, polite to elders and avuncular to juniors, silky smooth with girls, and blessed with such sound judgment that even when he was a child, his parents consulted him on difficult decisions. He ushered his mother into her seat at dinner, turned in at seven, and tucked his alarm clock under his pillow so as not to wake Louie, with whom he shared a bed. He rose at two-thirty to run a three-hour paper route, and deposited all his earnings in the bank, which would swallow every penny when the Depression hit. He had a lovely singing voice and a gallant habit of carrying pins in his pant cuffs, in case his dance partner's dress strap failed. He once saved a girl from drowning. Pete radiated a gentle but impressive authority that led everyone he met, even adults, to be swayed by his opinion. Even Louie, who made a religion out of heeding no one, did as Pete said.\ Louie idolized Pete, who watched over him and their younger sisters, Sylvia and Virginia, with paternal protectiveness. But Louie was eclipsed, and he never heard the end of it. Sylvia would recall her mother tearfully telling Louie how she wished he could be more like Pete. What made it more galling was that Pete's reputation was part myth. Though Pete earned grades little better than Louie's failing ones, his principal assumed that he was a straight-A student. On the night of Torrance's church bell miracle, a well-directed flashlight would have revealed Pete's legs dangling from the tree alongside Louie's. And Louie wasn't always the only Zamperini boy who could be seen sprinting down the alley with food that had lately belonged to the neighbors. But it never occurred to anyone to suspect Pete of anything. "Pete never got caught," said Sylvia. "Louie always got caught."\ Nothing about Louie fit with other kids. He was a puny boy, and in his first years in Torrance, his lungs were still compromised enough from the pneumonia that in picnic footraces, every girl in town could dust him. His features, which would later settle into pleasant collaboration, were growing at different rates, giving him a curious face that seemed designed by committee. His ears leaned sidelong off his head like holstered pistols, and above them waved a calamity of black hair that mortified him. He attacked it with his aunt Margie's hot iron, hobbled it in a silk stocking every night, and slathered it with so much olive oil that flies trailed him to school. It did no good.\ And then there was his ethnicity. In Torrance in the early 1920s, Italians were held in such disdain that when the Zamperinis arrived, the neighbors petitioned the city council to keep them out. Louie, who knew only a smattering of English until he was in grade school, couldn't hide his pedigree. He survived kindergarten by keeping mum, but in first grade, when he blurted out "Brutte bastarde!" at another kid, his teachers caught on. They compounded his misery by holding him back a grade.\ He was a marked boy. Bullies, drawn by his oddity and hoping to goad him into uttering Italian curses, pelted him with rocks, taunted him, punched him, and kicked him. He tried buying their mercy with his lunch, but they pummeled him anyway, leaving him bloody. He could have ended the beatings by running away or succumbing to tears, but he refused to do either. "You could beat him to death," said Sylvia, "and he wouldn't say 'ouch' or cry." He just put his hands in front of his face and took it. As Louie neared his teens, he took a hard turn. Aloof and bristling, he lurked around the edges of Torrance, his only friendships forged loosely with rough boys who followed his lead. He became so germophobic that he wouldn't tolerate anyone coming near his food. Though he could be a sweet boy, he was often short-tempered and obstreperous. He feigned toughness, but was secretly tormented. Kids passing into parties would see him lingering outside, unable to work up the courage to walk in.

Map xiv\ Preface xvii\ Part I\ 1 The One-Boy Insurgency 3\ 2 Run Like Mad 20\ 3 The Torrance Tornado 30\ 4 Plundering Germany 44\ 5 Into War 60\ Part II\ 6 The Flying Coffin 79\ 7 "This Is It, Boys" 201\ 8 "Only the Laundry Knew How Scared I Was" 121\ 9 Five Hundred and Ninety-four Holes 142\ 10 The Stinking Six 165\ 11 "Nobody's Going to Live Through This" 180\ Part III\ 12 Downed 195\ 13 Missing at Sea 204\ 14 Thirst 220\ 15 Sharks and Bullets 240\ 16 Singing in the Clouds 252\ 17 Typhoon 267\ Part IV\ 18 A Dead Body Breathing 281\ 19 Two Hundred Silent Men 298\ 20 Farting for Hirohito 316\ 21 Belief 336\ 22 Plots Afoot 349\ 23 Monster 365\ 24 Hunted 380\ 25 B-29 395\ 26 Madness 413\ 27 Falling Down 432\ 28 Enslaved 441\ 29 Two Hundred and Twenty Punches 458\ 30 The Boiling City 470\ 31 The Naked Stampede 481\ 32 Cascades of Pink Peaches 493\ 33 Mother's Day 509\ Part V\ 34 The Shimmering Girl 531\ 35 Coming Undone 550\ 36 The Body on the Mountain 564\ 37 Twisted Ropes 577\ 38 A Beckoning Whistle 586\ 39 Daybreak 601\ Epilogue 606\ Acknowledgments 635\ Notes 649\ Index 731

\ From Barnes & NobleIn May 1943, an Army Air Forces bomber crashed into the Pacific and quickly sank, leaving behind only two survivors bobbing helplessly in the restless seas. One of them was Louis Zamperini, a 26-year-old airman who had overcome a troubled past to become an Olympic athlete. After 47 perilous days adrift on a raft, Zamperini and his companion survivor were rescued by the Japanese navy. He remained a prisoner of war until the end of hostilities. This riveting narrative by the author of Seabiscuit is the story of one plucky man. Now ninety-three, Louis Zamperini lives on.\ \ \ \ \ \ Publishers WeeklyFrom the 1936 Olympics to WWII Japan's most brutal POW camps, Hillenbrand's heart-wrenching new book is thousands of miles and a world away from the racing circuit of her bestselling Seabiscuit. But it's just as much a page-turner, and its hero, Louie Zamperini, is just as loveable: a disciplined champion racer who ran in the Berlin Olympics, he's a wit, a prankster, and a reformed juvenile delinquent who put his thieving skills to good use in the POW camps, In other words, Louie is a total charmer, a lover of life--whose will to live is cruelly tested when he becomes an Army Air Corps bombardier in 1941. The young Italian-American from Torrance, Calif., was expected to be the first to run a four-minute mile. After an astonishing but losing race at the 1936 Olympics, Louie was hoping for gold in the 1940 games. But war ended those dreams forever. In May 1943 his B-24 crashed into the Pacific. After a record-breaking 47 days adrift on a shark-encircled life raft with his pal and pilot, Russell Allen "Phil" Phillips, they were captured by the Japanese. In the "theater of cruelty" that was the Japanese POW camp network, Louie landed in the cruelest theaters of all: Omori and Naoetsu, under the control of Corp. Mutsuhiro Watanabe, a pathologically brutal sadist (called the Bird by camp inmates) who never killed his victims outright--his pleasure came from their slow, unending torment. After one beating, as Watanabe left Louie's cell, Louie saw on his face a "soft languor.... It was an expression of sexual rapture." And Louie, with his defiant and unbreakable spirit, was Watanabe's victim of choice. By war's end, Louie was near death. When Naoetsu was liberated in mid-August 1945, a depleted Louie's only thought was "I'm free! I'm free! I'm free!" But as Hillenbrand shows, Louie was not yet free. Even as, returning stateside, he impulsively married the beautiful Cynthia Applewhite and tried to build a life, Louie remained in the Bird's clutches, haunted in his dreams, drinking to forget, and obsessed with vengeance. In one of several sections where Hillenbrand steps back for a larger view, she writes movingly of the thousands of postwar Pacific PTSD sufferers. With no help for their as yet unrecognized illness, Hillenbrand says, "there was no one right way to peace; each man had to find his own path...." The book's final section is the story of how, with Cynthia's help, Louie found his path. It is impossible to condense the rich, granular detail of Hillenbrand's narrative of the atrocities committed (one man was exhibited naked in a Tokyo zoo for the Japanese to "gawk at his filthy, sore-encrusted body") against American POWs in Japan, and the courage of Louie and his fellow POWs, who made attempts on Watanabe's life, committed sabotage, and risked their own lives to save others. Hillenbrand's triumph is that in telling Louie's story (he's now in his 90s), she tells the stories of thousands whose suffering has been mostly forgotten. She restores to our collective memory this tale of heroism, cruelty, life, death, joy, suffering, remorselessness, and redemption. (Nov.) -Reviewed by Sarah F. Gold\ \ \ Booklist“[Hillenbrand’s] skills are as polished as ever, and like its predecessor, this book has an impossible-to-put-down quality that one commonly associates with good thrillers.”\ — Booklist\ \ \ \ \ AMERICA IN WWIImagazineLaura Hillenbrand’s impressive, inventive Unbroken is six books in one. It starts in the harsh squalor of Depression America and ends with personal renewal at the dawn of the 21st century. This, in a nutshell, is Louie Zamperini’s amazing life. Hillenbrand tells a great story of ordinary people caught in the gears of war. Though she is best known for Seabiscuit, she succeeds here in writing a very different kind of book, absolutely worth reading for anyone interested in history or renewal.--(Thomas Mullen)\ \ \ \ \ Publishers Weekly“Heart-wrenching...It is impossible to condense the rich, granular detail of Hillenbrand's narrative...[her] triumph is that in telling Louie's story (he's now in his 90s), she tells the stories of thousands whose suffering has been mostly forgotten. She restores to our collective memory this tale of heroism, cruelty, life, death, joy, suffering, remorselessness, and redemption.”\ — Publishers Weekly (starred review)\ \ \ \ \ From the PublisherPraise for Unbroken\ \ "A master class in narrative storytelling…Extraordinarily moving...A powerfully drawn survival epic."—The Wall Street Journal\ "Will you be able to put [Unbroken] down once you poke your nose into it? You will not. … No one delivers a play-by-play better than Laura Hillenbrand… No other author of narrative nonfiction chooses her subjects with greater discrimination or renders them with more discipline and commitment. If storytelling were an Olympic event, she’d medal for sure…"—Laura Miller, Salon\ "Unbroken is wonderful twice over, for the tale it tells and for the way it’s told. A better book than Seabiscuit, it manages maximum velocity with no loss of subtlety. [Hillenbrand has] a jeweler’s eye for a detail that makes a story live."—Newsweek\ "Monumental… as mesmerizing as it is gut-wrenching. Hillenbrand’s writing is so ferociously cinematic, the events she describes so incredible, you don’t dare take your eyes off the page."—People\ "Ambitious and powerful… Hillenbrand is intelligent and restrained, and wise enough to let the story unfold for itself. Her research is thorough, her writing crystalline. Unbroken is gripping in an almost cinematic way." The New York Times Book Review\ "Hillenbrand is a muscular, dynamic storyteller… But she happens also to have located a tale full of unforgettable characters, multihanky moments and wild turns…A bang up research job.—The New York Times\ "A one-in-a-billion story… seems designed to wrench from self-respecting critics all the blurby adjectives we normally try to avoidL It is amazing, unforgettable, gripping, harrowing, chilling, and inspiring. It sucked me in and swept me away. It kept me reading late into the night. I could not…(it really hurts me to type this)…put it…(must find the strength to resist)… down."—New York Magazine\ "A warning: after cracking open Unbroken you may find yourself dog tired the next day, having spent most of the night fending off sleep with coffee refills, eager to find out whether the story of Louis Zamperini, Olympic runner turned WWII POW, ends in redemption or despair..In Hillenbrand’s [hands], it’s nothing less than a marvel—a book worth losing sleep over."—The Washingtonian\ "Zamperini’s story is certainly one of the most remarkable survival tales ever recorded. What happened after that is equally remarkable. Do yourself…a favor and buy the book."—Graydon Carter, Vanity Fair\ "Hillenbrand demonstrates a dazzling ability—one Seabiscuit only hinted at—to make the tale leap off the page…. Irresistible.—Elle\ "A tale of triumph and redemption…a clear-eyed tale of yet another underestimated creature who tried hard, ran fast, and miraculously beat the odds. … Astonishingly detailed.."—O magazine\ "Another epic of long odds and unbreakable spirit… Zamperini’s story is almost dangerously rich, full of pulpy overheated detail, but Hillenbrand cools and tempers it with precise prose and disciplined eye for facts that ground Zamperini’s incredible odyssey in reality."—TIME\ "An astonishing testament to the superhuman power of tenacity…" —Entertainment Weekly\ "Intense…you better hold onto the reins."—The Boston Globe\ "Riveting…so haunting and so beautifully written, those who fall under its spell will never again feel the same way about World War II and one of its previously unsung heroes."—Columbus Dispatch\ "Incredible… Zamperini’s life is one of courage, heroism, humility and unflagging endurance…"—St. Louis Post Dispatch\ "Unbroken is too much book to hope for: a hell ride of a story in the grip of the one writer who can handle it. Killing sharks with his bare hands...outracing Olympic runners...outwitting one of the most notorious fiends to stalk Japan's POW camps — when it comes to courage, humanity, and impossible adventure, few will ever match "the boy terror of Torrance," and few but the author of Seabicuit could tell his tale with such humanity and dexterity. Laura Hillenbrand has given us a new national treasure."\ —Christopher McDougall, author of Born to Run: A Hidden Tribe, Super Athletes, and the Greatest Race the World Has Never Seen\ "Hillenbrand has once again brought to life the true story of a forgotten hero, and reminded us how lucky we are to have her, one of our best writers of narrative history. You don’t have to be a sports fan or a war-history buff to devour this book—you just have to love great storytelling." —Rebecca Skloot, author of The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks\ "Heart-wrenching…It is impossible to condense the rich, granular detail of Hillenbrand's narrative…[her] triumph is that in telling Louie's story (he's now in his 90s), she tells the stories of thousands whose suffering has been mostly forgotten. She restores to our collective memory this tale of heroism, cruelty, life, death, joy, suffering, remorselessness, and redemption."—Publishers Weekly (starred review)\ "[Hillenbrand] returns with another dynamic, well-researched story of guts overcoming odds…Alternately stomach-wrenching, anger-arousing and spirit-lifting—and always gripping."—Kirkus Reviews\ "[Hillenbrand’s] skills are as polished as ever, and like its predecessor, this book has an impossible-to-put-down quality that one commonly associates with good thrillers."—Booklist\ \ \ "Unbroken is too much book to hope for: a hellride of a story in the grip of the one writer who can handle it. Killing sharks with his bare hands...outracing Olympic runners...outwitting one of the most notorious fiends to stalk Japan's POW camps — when it comes to courage, charisma, and impossible adventure, few will ever match "the boy terror of Torrance," and few but the author of Seabiscuit could tell his tale with such humanity and dexterity. Laura Hillenbrand has given us a new national treasure." \ —Christopher McDougall, author of Born to Run: A Hidden Tribe, Super Athletes, and the Greatest Race the World Has Never Seen.\ Praise for Laura Hillenbrand’s Seabiscuit: An American Legend\  \ “Captivating . . . a flawless trip, with the detail of good history, the blistering pace of Biscuit himself, and the charm of grand legend.”\ —The New York Times Book Review\  \ “Wonderful . . . astounding . . . almost unbearably suspenseful . . . Ideally, you wouldn’t just find Laura Hillenbrand’s Seabiscuit: An American Legend in bookstores. It would be next to Frank Sinatra and Nat King Cole or Lee Wiley CDs as well—anywhere you’d go to look for love songs.”\ —Salon\  \ “It is hugely refreshing when [a book] as fine as this one comes along. The research is meticulous, the writing elegant and concise, so that every page transports you back to the period. . . . This is a remarkable tale well told.”\ —The Economist\  \ “Engrossing . . . terrific . . . Hillenbrand not only ties . . . divergent personalities into a fast-moving narrative but also shows an extraordinary talent for describing a horse race so vividly that the reader feels like the rider.”\ —Sports Illustrated\  \ “A first-rate piece of storytelling . . . an absorbing book that stands as the model of sportswriting at its best.”\ —Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times\  \ “A galloping success . . . a fascinating portrait of an era and a wildly exciting, truth-is-stranger-than-fiction yarn . . . so vividly rendered, it’s hard to believe Seabiscuit was written by anyone who didn’t live through the events it describes.”\ —Time Out New York\  \ “Rousing . . . brilliant and convincing . . . Hillenbrand doesn’t just tell the story; she re-creates it. . . . Seabiscuit belongs in the winner’s circle.”\ —Austin-American Statesman\  \ \ \ \ \ \ Kirkus ReviewsThe author of Seabiscuit (2001) returns with another dynamic, well-researched story of guts overcoming odds.\ Hillenbrand examines the life of Louis Zamperini, an American airman who, after his bomber crashed in the Pacific during World War II, survived 47 days on a life raft only to be captured by Japanese soldiers and subjected to inhuman treatment for the next two years at a series of POW camps. That his life spiraled out of control when he returned home to the United States is understandable. However, he was able to turn it around after meeting Billy Graham, and he became a Christian speaker and traveled to Japan to forgive his tormentors. The author reconstructs Zamperini's wild youth, when his hot temper, insubordination, and bold pranks seemed to foretell a future life of crime. His talents as a runner, however, changed all that, getting him to the 1936 Olympics and to the University of Southern California, where he was a star of the track team. When the story turns to World War II, Hillenbrand expands her narrative to include men who served with him in the Air Corps in the Pacific. Through letters and interviews, she brings to life not just the men who were with Zamperini on the life raft and in the Japanese camps, but the families they left behind. The suffering of the men is often difficult to read, for the details of starvation, thirst and shark attacks are followed by the specifics of the brutalities inflicted by the Japanese, particularly the sadistic Mutsuhiro Watanabe, who seemed dedicated to making Zamperini's life unbearable. Hillenbrand follows Watanabe's life after the Japanese surrender, providing the perfect foil to Zamperini's. When Zamperini wrote to his former tormentor to forgive him and attempted to meet him in person, Watanabe rejected him. Throughout are photographs of World War II bombers, POW camps, Zamperini and his fellow GIs and their families and sweethearts, providing a glimpse into a bygone era. Zamperini is still thriving at age 93.\ Alternately stomach-wrenching, anger-arousing and spirit-lifting—and always gripping.\ \ \ \ \ \ Janet MaslinJust as she demonstrated in Seabiscuit, Ms. Hillenbrand is a muscular, dynamic storyteller…Her command of the action-adventure idiom is more than enough to hold interest. But she happens also to have located a tale full of unforgettable characters, multi-hanky moments and wild turns. And if some of it sounds too much like pulp fiction to be true, Ms. Hillenbrand has also done a bang-up research job…[Unbroken]manages to be as exultant as Seabiscuit as it tells a much more harrowing, less heart-warming story.\ —The New York Times\ \ \ \ \ Library JournalHillenbrand (www.laurahillenbrandbooks.com), author of Seabiscuit (2003)—also available from Books on Tape/Random Audio—presents another extensively researched and compellingly written tale of steadfastness. At the centerpiece of this historical biography set during World War II is Louis Zamperini, a one-time U.S. Olympics distance runner-turned-Army Air Force bombardier whose plane goes down over the Pacific. Emmy Award-winning actor Edward Herrmann, who frequently does voice-over work for the History Channel, uses his rich voice to infuse Hillenbrand's tale with a palpable dramatic flavor, casting Zamperini as a symbol of the American ethos. Recommended for those interested in World War II and American history and for anyone liking Seabiscuit. [The LJ and New York Times best-selling Random hc was recommended "for general readers who like a good story and for World War II history buffs," LJ 10/1/10.—Ed.]—Christopher Rager, Pasadena, CA\ \ \ \ \ The Barnes & Noble ReviewAlmost three quarters into Unbroken, the book's subject, World War II airman Louis Zamperini, is transferred from one Japanese POW camp, Omori, to another, called Naoetsu. When Laura Hillenbrand writes, "Of the many hells that Louie had known in this war, this place would be the worst," the effect is jarring. By this point in the narrative Zamperini has already crashed into the Pacific, drifted on a life raft for 47 days surviving on little more than rainwater, been captured by the Japanese, and been beaten and nearly starved at three previous camps. How much more can he take?\ Things do get worse at Naoetsu: under the sadistic rule of Corporal Mutsuhiro Watanabe, called the Bird by prisoners, Louie (as he's referred to throughout the book) is forced into slave labor and falls gravely ill before the camp's liberation in August 1945. It is Hillenbrand's great accomplishment that the heart of Unbroken, describing the more than two brutal years between Louie's crash and his unlikely return home, is not an exhausting catalog of misery but a suspenseful and at times uplifting testament to human survival. And just as Hillenbrand's previous book, Seabiscuit, was about more than a horse, so Unbroken ends up being about more than the punishing wartime experiences of one man.\ Louis Zamperini, son of Italian immigrants, was born in 1917 and grew up in Torrance, California. According to Hillenbrand, he was "untamable" in childhood, picking up smoking at age 5 and drinking at 8. He seemed to be headed for a life of crime until his older brother, Pete, began coaching him in track. Louie, a naturally gifted runner, immediately started winning meets and breaking records, and he ended up representing the United States in the 5000-meter race at the 1936 Olympics in Berlin. He didn't win, but his performance impressed Hitler, who asked to meet him.\ Louie's dreams of medaling at the 1940 Olympics were of course dashed by the war. As an Army Air Forces bombardier, Louie -- under the assured flying of Russell Allen Phillips, piloting a B-24 -- participated in a number of combat missions in the Pacific theater. But it was a rescue mission that sent Louie, Phillips, and nine other men into the air on May 27, 1943, searching for a B-24 that had gone down. When their plane crashed in turn, only Louie, Phillips, and one other man, a tail gunner named Francis "Mac" McNamara, survived.\ Hillenbrand describes the men's 47-day ordeal at sea in wrenching detail, including the constant circling of sharks, an attack by a Japanese bomber on the 27th day, and Mac's death on the 33rd. By the time they reached land, having drifted 2000 miles to the Marshall Islands, each man had lost at least half his body weight. While Louie and Phillips were treated kindly by the stunned Japanese who found them, they were soon transferred to Kwajalein, nicknamed Execution Island, where, separated into tiny, sweltering, dark cells teeming with lice, mosquitoes, and maggots, Louie actually "missed the raft."\ As Unbroken recounts the trials that Louie faced during and after the war (much of the narrative is based on interviews with him), Hillenbrand often pulls back to paint a broader picture. An exhaustive researcher, she provides context on everything from wartime flight (in the Pacific theater, "for every plane lost in combat, some six planes were lost in accidents," and search planes may have been more likely to go down than to find the men they were searching for) to the neglected stories of Pacific POWs. "Of the 34,648 Americans held by Japan, 12,935 -- more than 37 percent -- died. By comparison, only 1 percent of Americans held by the Nazis and Italians died," she writes, explaining that the Japanese contempt for POWs was rooted in a cultural belief that "to be captured in war was intolerably shameful."\ Hillenbrand also paces the book expertly, inserting affirming moments of grace and heroism just when the narrative is getting unbearably grim. She describes the kindnesses of several Japanese guards and POWs -- including Louie, who once gave his ration to a critically ill friend, calling it "the hardest and easiest thing he ever did." She also details the "humming underground of defiance" that existed at the camps, the risky acts of rebellion through which captives communicated war news to each other and stole food. Louie was even able to keep a diary with a tiny book made of flattened rice paste sewn into pages.\ Now 93, the remarkable Zamperini has outlived his siblings, his wife, and most everyone he served with. His first years home were clouded by nightmares, heavy drinking, and an obsession with revenge, and he credits a conversion at a revival led by a young Billy Graham with turning his life around. Louie (who told his own story in a 2003 autobiography, Devil at My Heels) eventually founded a camp for troubled boys. He has visited Japan and met with some of his former captors. He's carried the Olympic torch at five different Games. The book includes a photograph of him riding a skateboard at 81.\ But, as Hillenbrand seems to acknowledge by dedicating Unbroken to "the wounded and the lost," the book is haunted by the presence of those who didn't survive the war. In Louie's cell at Execution Island someone had carved the names of nine marines who'd been captured there and, Louie learned, executed. He carved his name alongside theirs but, of course, met a different fate. While Louis Zamperini is probably -- and deservedly -- about to become as well known as Seabiscuit, it's difficult to read Unbroken without thinking of all the lives cut short and stories never told.\ --Barbara Spindel\ \ \