As I was closing out the final pages of Laura Hillenbrand’s Unbroken on the train last week, a woman stopped me to ask how I was liking it. I replied that it takes it out of you—this book whose every chapter is more grim than the one before. “But it’s okay right?” she responded, shopping bags and Starbucks cup in tow. “Because he goes free in the end?”
It’s a credit to our threshold for human suffering that a World War II bombardier lost at sea for 47 days and then imprisoned in Japanese POW camps for more than two years is considered a victor in his life story. Yes, Louis Zamperini, the recently deceased subject of Hillenbrand’s wildly successful 2010 biography, was eventually freed. Yes, he lived to tell the tale. But a man does not walk away from such experiences cleanly, and the effects of Louie’s POW life on his post-POW life are apparent down to Unbroken’s very last page.
Much of this book’s plot has become common knowledge, perhaps by virtue of the comprehensive movie trailer, perhaps because of various interviews with Louis in the last few years. So I’ll sacrifice the time I’d usually spend on plot summation to jump directly to Hillenbrand, an author whose own limitations (chronic fatigue syndrome and its attendant symptoms have kept her homebound for years) are her personal testament to human resilience in the face of adversity. I’ve never read anything by LH before, and was pleased to find in her, like Erik Larson (author of Devil in the White City and In the Garden of Beasts) a penchant for research that borders on the insane (Unbroken ends with 8 pages of detailed acknowledgments and 40 pages of reference notes). This book is so thoroughly executed that it reads like fiction, and Hillenbrand’s dedication to describing 60-year-old events in vivid detail is beyond impressive. Of course, she had help—a pertinent quote from Louie kicks off the book’s acknowledgments section: “I’ll be an easier subject than Seabiscuit,” he tells her, “because I can talk.”
Continue reading “Unbroken broke me a little”
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