An Amazing Story I Almost Got to Finish

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Today is Thursday, which means it was library day.

On Thursday mornings we leave our usual activities behind

 

(which is often a welcome break), and head to our local library for storytime. We enjoy browsing for books, looking for fun DVDs, and chasing Alaina around.

 

Sometimes it's my favorite day of the week.

This week, however, I was dreading Thursday because I was frantically trying to finish an amazing book I had for only two weeks :)

The book was Unbroken by Laura Hillenbrand. It told the true story of a man named Louis Zamperini, who started out as somewhat of a juvenile delinquent then became an Olympic runner and a World War II soldier, then a prisoner of war.

 

When I started reading Unbroken I wondered if I would like it, because the author used an objective, journalistic style (I usually prefer a first-person narrative style). It only took a couple of chapters, though, for me to feel drawn into the story.

As I got further into the book, I even told Benjamin and Janae about some of the incredible experiences Zamperini lived through, including being shot down from a plane and living on an inflatable raft for an extraordinary amount of time--without food or water--and all the while being pursued by sharks and/or enemy gunfire (I don't want to give too much away!). After the experience on the raft, he lived over two years in a prison camp--once again enduring things I could hardly believe.

I had to leave out many of the gruesome parts, but I still had both children wide-eyed and completely enthralled.

Unbroken took the author seven years to research and write--it is well documented (with footnotes explaining many of the story's details and giving additional information about minor incidents) and has a part at the end that describes Hillenbrand's interviews with Zamperini and several other prominent figures in the story. I learned a lot about World War II and also about what human beings are capable of living through.

In fact, this morning, when I had to put on jeans that were slightly damp from the dryer, I halted my complaints, thinking about what people living in war camps had to endure (How about the same pants you'd been wearing for over two years while mining coal and cleaning outhouses . . . not to mention sleeping in fleas and eating worse than rotten food--and even that, only on good days?). It kind of puts things in perspective :)

Unfortunately, I had to skim the last hundred pages last night to find out all that happened. (This included some severe post-war trauma that Zamperini experienced and then finally overcame through his religious faith.)

I will have to request the book again so I can read the end of it in more detail.

 

Anyway, it is a book I would highly recommend!