Book Review Sunday

Book: Unbroken
Author: Laura Hillenbrand
Pages: 398

Ah, the first book of a new year.  Some years they're duds, but not this year.  This year the first book was a winner.

I  belong to two book clubs.  The first one is a club where I'm the youngest member by about 20 years. There are six of us and four of the ladies are older than my mom.  The fifth lady is the daughter of one of the other ones, but I'd say she's around 50.  At first, I felt funny going.  They are part of the other kingdom but the offending "princess" moved away.  But, as it turns out, I really like going.  They are people I wouldn't really socialize with outside of the book club because of our huge generational gap, but we all come from different walks of life and the discussions are both interesting and entertaining.  Plus they tend to read books that are vastly different than the ones we read in Book Club #2. 

Book Club #2 was the one that I helped organize on my side of the street.  We have about five faithful members, though others will flit in and out during the year.  We're all about the same age with about the same story and tend to read the same types of books every month.  And so, while I really enjoy it, I enjoy it for different reasons than I do the first one. 

To be honest, I thought one of the book clubs would flounder and I wouldn't have to choose, so I just kept going to both of them.  But then, I really started getting into both of them and I realized I didn't want either of them to fail.  So I've just been going to two book clubs a month. 

What does this have to do with the book?  Nothing really.  Just that it was Bookclub #1's pick for January.

And I LOVED it.  LOVED, LOVED, LOVED it.  When it was picked, I hadn't heard anything about it, but over the last month, it's picked up some serious press.  It's by the same person who wrote Seabiscuit.  I hated the movie Seabiscuit, so I was a little nervous to pick up this book, but I'm glad I did.

What's it about?  It's about Louis Zamperini, who was one of America's best middle distance runners in the mid 1930's.  He went to the Olympics in Berlin in 1936 at just 19 years old.  He was rumored to be closing in on the four-minute mile--a benchmark previously thought humanly impossible--when he enlisted in the air force in 1941 for World War II. 

What happened after that is unbelievable.  He went from being a hometown hero to being stranded out in the shark-infested Pacific Ocean on a lifeboat to a POW in Japanese labor camps.  His family wouldn't hear from him in nearly 2 1/2 years.  His experiences are a harrowing reminder of the sacrifices our military has made over the span of many years and wars to ensure our freedoms today.

With so much written about Germany's hand in the war and the atrocities that occurred under Hitler, it's easy to forget that Japan was just as cunning and evil.  Zamperini's stories gave me goose bumps and I teared up on more than one occassion.  It's hard to fathom that a person, or group of people, could be so mean and degrading to other human beings.

This book read almost like a novel.  I found myself so nervous to see if someone made it out of the camps alive or not, I had to flip to the back of the book.  I loved that Hillenbrand dove into Zamperini's history, before the war, and after.  I got a true sense of who he really was outside of his experiences in the war, as well as how those experiences changed him when he returned home. She definitely did her research--it took her a reportedly 7 years to write the book--and the book is peppered with facts and statistics that really brought the whole thing full circle. It really hits home that he was younger than me when all this was happening. 

Unbroken is a definite read.  Obviously, I loved it because it combined two passions--running and World War II--but even if running isn't your thing, you would still find this to be interesting and, strangely enough, uplifting. If Zamperini survived what he did, then I can most definitely survive my trials.  I love that Zamperini took up skateboarding in his seventies and is still alive at 93.  However, it's a reminder that the last of those who fought in World War II are nearing the end and soon there will be no more survivors to tell these stories.