TAB Book Reviews - October 2024

The Mercer County Library System Teen Advisory Board is full of talented teenagers. Throughout the year, these teenagers create social media posts, write zines for young patrons and write book reviews which are posted to the library’s GoodReads account. Please enjoy this recent review by TAB member Olamide, who loves the library as much as her books!

If you’d told me that by the end of reading Unbroken, Laura Hillenbrand’s historical non-fiction that retells Louie Zamperini’s story of “survival, resilience, and redemption,” I would be sobbing at home on a random Monday at 11pm, I would’ve laughed, or maybe thrown you a skeptical glance, and gone about my day. In fact, even if you’d given me a heads up to the tearworks a hundred pages into the book, I still wouldn’t have given you the time of day.

But there was something about the 200-page mark, the beginning of a depreciating life in Japan’s slave camps during WWII, that drew me in. My once hazy eyes refocused and Unbroken became more than just an assignment. I couldn’t stop turning the pages.

Now, before I continue with this review, I would like to add something that might have influenced my reading experience: I watched the movie first. As a result, going into the book, I knew the general gist of the story, or so I thought.

Louie Zamperini was, perhaps, the world’s most insolent child, and definitely the most insolent in Torrance, California. He couldn’t stay still, running off at train stations and hiding under bridges - often leaving his Italian mother, Louise, frantic and heartbroken. At a young age, he picked up drinking and smoking; somewhere along the way, fighting and stealing joined in and began to drastically shape who he’d become for most of his teenage years. He would steal from his neighbors, the church, school; hopping over fences, through windows, breaking locks, and then, he’d “run like mad.” After he socks a girl in the face or punches a guy so much he passes out on the side of the road, he’d run back home, as fast as his legs could carry him.

To Pete, however, his little brother’s adventures throughout the neighborhood illustrated something more than just stubbornness. If only he could redirect his energy towards the track, Louie would make a great runner.

And so began Louie’s journey to the 1936 Olympic Games where, although he didn’t place, he broke records by running America’s fastest Olympic 5,000 and running his final lap in 56 seconds, the world’s fastest at the time. He won several other awards in his few years of running with Pete as his coach, competing against and often dominating America’s top athletes at a very young age. Unfortunately, due to the war, the 1940 Olympics supposedly happening in Japan is canceled and Louie is thrust headfirst, like millions of other young men across the Allied nations, into the war. He registers with the Air Force and is sent to the Pacific Islands to await further instructions. Soon enough, he’s sent on his first mission with his squadron as a bomber, consequently completing a few more, until a search mission across the Pacific Ocean leaves him, Phil, and Mac stranded on a floating raft in the middle of a turbulent ocean filled with sharks for about 47 days. The other men from his squadron are never seen again.

It’s amidst these drifting seas that they’re captured by the Japanese as prisoners of war (POWs) and dumped in camps that violated basic human rights, drastically cutting food rations for already starved prisoners, overworking POWs at coal mines and other industries of war, hitting, kicking, punching, and outrightly abusing POWs so much that some die from the beatings. From Ofuna to Omori to Naoetsu, Louie Zamperini endured conditions similar to enslavement and lost almost half his body weight from illnesses like diarrhea, beriberi, etc. He would encounter a fair share of particularly brutal officers who resorted to hitting the POWs at the slightest provocation. In these dire times, Louie’s stubbornness and resilience, created by his fighting sprees in his hometown, would help him through and give him the strength to hope.

Finally, about three years later, the POWs are rescued by a series of B-29s that rained emergency supplies and sea bags filled with food, magazines, cigarettes, and brought the promise of freedom to thousands of Allied men scattered across the Pacific.

This is where the movie ends. But the book delves deeper, covering the nuances to reentry for veterans into civilian life. Louie, especially, hides his trauma behind a joyful façade. Until, finally, after an impromptu marriage, losing most of his earnings, and struggling day after day with nightmares, he barrels out of control and returns to his old habits. He starts to use hard liquor to forget the war, causing him to pass out repeatedly and lash out for no reason.

It’s the moment, when, after days of convincing, Louie attends a Bill Graham program and discovers his saving grace, that makes Unbroken deserving of a 9.5/10 rating. The same moment when tears found my eyes and I couldn’t stop till I finished the book.

There’s simply something about the way Hillenbrand writes: the way she takes her readers through each coherent and incoherent emotion that Louie’s family, his friends and their families, and Louie himself experience. How she bounces back and forth between Louie’s story and historical facts, mixing numbers and emotions to arouse a sort of sensation is inexplicably (her favorite word) fascinating. For a historical nonfiction/memoir/biography, she does a good job drawing connections throughout the book, referring to Louie’s childhood stubbornness when he’s punched in the face by 225 POWs in one night, or drawing on his teenage dream to run in the Olympics as hope for the future during dire times. The pacing, though initially slow, as it tries to set up his childhood and journey to the Air Force, picks up on the raft and increasingly piqued my interest once Louie becomes a spectacle to the Japanese; his resilience becoming an important element of the plot and his life.

Nonetheless, because the book tells the story of real people –Louie, Phil, Harris, Fitzgerald, the Bird, etc– and their experiences, it’s hard to conduct a literary analysis on the plot or other common literary elements. Thus, I’ll say this instead: if you’re looking to discover a rather hidden history about Japan’s horrendous participation in WWII, or you’re looking to read a biography of life as a POW, or you’re reading to see how badly the American government often fails its veterans, or you’re reading to rekindle your faith in God, or you simply want to learn about the irrepressible and almost immortal Louie Zamperini, then this book is for you.

I hope that whether you start with the movie or the book, Hillenbrand’s Unbroken invokes as much thought and tears as it did for me in its final pages.