Unbroken: A Thrilling Story of Courage

Laura Hillenbrand’s Unbroken reads like fiction, but it’s the true story of an American man who achieved greatness and survived horrors.
Louis Zamperini’s story would be extraordinary even if it ended in 1936, when, at 19, he became the youngest American distance runner ever to compete in the Olympics. Experts predicted he might become the first man to break the four-minute mile, and he attracted widespread attention when he ran a 4:12 mile in the Berlin Olympics.
But Zamperini’s tale was only just beginning. In 1943, while he was serving as a bombardier in the Army Air Corps, Zamperini’s B-24 crashed into the Pacific Ocean, stranding him on a canvas raft with two other survivors. The three men were scorched by the sun, circled by sharks, and running out of food and water. Zamperini survived this hell for more than 40 days. When he finally made it to land, he stepped into a new nightmare. The raft landed on the Japanese-occupied Marshall Islands, where Zamperini was shuttled through a series of POW camps for two years. His former status as a celebrity athlete made him a target for cruel prison guards…and a legend reborn when he survived and returned to the United States.
His story is incredible because of what he survived, but it’s elevated to legend by how he survived: with dignity, despite the cruelest of conditions. It’s rare to encounter heroes like Zamperini, and rarer still to have richly realized accounts of their stories to read and to share.

This Christmas, Zamperini’s story is coming to the big screen in a film directed by Angelina Jolie. As all book-lovers know, it’s best to read the book before seeing the movie. And for the teen in your life, be sure to pick up the Young Adult adaptation of Unbroken, written by Laura Hillenbrand herself.
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