Braddy Reads Unbroken

The book club I meet with isn’t reading anything for December, so I started on January’s book a bit early. And I fully expected to take the whole month and a half to finish it. After all, I simply don’t care much for biographies. I also don’t much like sports or war stories. So when January’s book (Laura Hillenbrand’s Unbroken) tells the true life story of Olympic runner and World War II veteran Louie Zamperini, I expected to be bored to tears.

The first hundred pages felt like they took forever to read. The story follows young Louie through his troubled childhood. It traces his journey to the 1936 Olympics and all the records that he broke along the way. Louie’s hopes of winning the gold in 1940 were shattered by the start of World War II. He joined the Army Air Force and trained to be a bomber. On a rescue mission, his plane failed, and Louie and two other men found themselves adrift in the Pacific Ocean. They remained on the raft for over a month, catching birds to use as bait for fishing. While out on the ocean, the three men were attacked by a Japanese plane. Louie dove over the side of the raft to avoid getting shot, and he found he had to defend himself against ravenous sharks. He gritted his teeth, balled up his fists, and swung, and then…

WHEN THE HECK DID I START LIKING THIS BOOK?

Somewhere along the line, Hillenbrand hooked me in. The first 100 pages took me about two days. I finished the remaining 300 pages in another two days of non-stop reading.

It would be enough if the book was just a good adventure, but Hillenbrand extrapolates some fascinating morality from Zamperini’s story. She discusses at length how Zamperini’s “dignity” carried him through all his adversity. She makes a strong connection between a person’s dignity and their will to survive. It’s a fascinating subject to think on, and I found it well worth reading through Unbroken just for that.

Altough I think the book really should have been titled Sharkpuncher.