Unbroken - Laura Hillenbrand

Unbroken was my latest audiobook, following Missoula as a selection to listen to while walking to and from work some days and while running.  It had been on my to-read list for a while, but wasn't high-priority, so it seemed like a good audiobook choice.  It's the story of Louis Zamperini, an American bombardier in World War II who competed in the 1936 Olympics as a runner, was expected to be the first person to break the four-minute mile, and who ultimately survived the crash of his plane, an extended time in a life raft, sharks, and a series of prison camps in Japan and its territories, including under the reign of a nightmare of a man known to the prisoners as The Bird.  There's also a little nod to Hillenbrand's other book, Seabiscuit--namely that, upon seeing Louis run, someone said that Seabiscuit was the only one that could beat him.

It's an incredible story; Louis had a bit of a misspent youth, and his brother (who was sometimes his co-conspirator, though Louis seemed to be the only one to ever get caught) helped straighten him out by turning him into a runner.  Louis ended up competing in the 5,000 meter event in the 1936 Olympics in Berlin, running in an event that he'd only practiced a few times before his arrival in Germany.  Though he didn't medal, he seemed to be set for the next Olympics as a competitor for the mile--until the US was pulled into World War II and Louis was drafter into the Army Air Force, where he'd briefly enlisted before.  When his plane crashed during a search and rescue mission, Louis and two crewmates survived and found themselves stranded in a life raft that was abysmally poorly provisioned; the three men only had two bars of chocolate and a few cans of fresh water.  Eventually, two of them survived to be picked up...by a Japanese ship, and they promptly became prisoners of war, except without any of the rights accorded to prisoners of war by the Geneva Convention.  Spending time in three different prison camps and never registered with the Red Cross, Louis was lost; his family thought he was dead, and at times, he probably wished he was.

This is a truly amazing story, but I'm ultimately not sure that "Unbroken" is a good title for it.  Louis survived his imprisonment, yes, but he was very, very broken after it.  With a nasty case of PTSD that led him into alcoholism, an obsession with finding and killing The Bird, and nightmares that once had him waking up strangling his wife, Louis certainly didn't walk away from his imprisonment in Japan "unbroken."  Additionally, while it's certainly a story of survival and resilience, I'm not entirely sure where "redemption" plays into it, unless you're counting it as in "The Redeemed Captive" sense, where it means being brought back.  Louis didn't really have anything to be redeemed from; is Hillenbrand trying to get at his religious conversion and eventual comeback from his PTSD, at least to some extent?  Because that's not something that he really needed to be "redeemed" from.  So, yes, probably not the best titling there.

It's an intriguing book and story of survival, but it does drag on a bit.  Every single detail that Hillenbrand seems to have been able to unearth is listed here; every beating, every beating that other prisoners suffered, multiple accounts of how Louis' family was pining away in America for him, though nothing ever changed between these sidebars until it was discovered Louis was, in fact, alive.  Additionally, the final part of the book that detailed Louis' life after the war seemed to drag on.  It really hammers home that PTSD is not a "new" thing, as some people make it out to be, but it also goes into sometimes agonizing detail about what The Bird was up to and how he didn't feel responsible for his actions or that said actions were really bad to begin with.  I understand wanting to have the story be "complete," but it seemed so much slower and dragged on so much more than the earlier parts of the book.  This clearly isn't the "main" story and I feel like it could have been wrapped up in a much shorter section than it was truly given.  It was probably meant to hammer on the "redemption" theme that Hillenbrand was apparently going for, but I really wasn't feeling it.

Overall, this was a good book, but it's nothing I'd be reaching for again.  The pacing was strange and it sometimes seemed over-sensationalized; it was an amazing story on its own, so it didn't really need all of the "look at how amazing this is!" hammering that Hillenbrand laid on it.  It's also not a story of someone remaining unbroken; everyone has a breaking point, everyone, and Louis definitely hit his during his captivity.  His survival was remarkable, but I think Hillenbrand actually blew it up and made it too "larger than life" for it to come off as sincere here.

3 stars out of 5.