So, recently in Humanities we have been researching about WWII. Our end product is a website, a podcast and a book review. This post is all about the book review.

We had a choice of three books, Unbroken by: Laura Hillenbrand, Code Name Verity by: Elizabeth Wein, and All The Light We Cannot See by: Anthony Doerr.

I chose Unbroken.

I read it over the course of three days down in Hawaii. (I was on vacation there over spring break)

Now after we finished our books we had to write a book review. We looked at multiple examples done by the NYT and other press companies and based off of that we made an idea of how a book review should be written, what goes into it and so on.

Unbroken Book Review

By: Alex Hutchison

When I finished Unbroken by Laura Hillenbrand, I immediately thought to myself “Wow, I can’t believe that actually happened.” It was such a surreal story. 

Yes, I’ve read many books on some of the darker subjects of WWII; Hidden, like Anne Frank and The Diary of a Young Girl: Anne Frank, but I have never read a book or even seen a movie quite like this. 

It begins on a bit of a lighter note. You journey through a rambunctious boy’s childhood and follow Louie Zamperini into his Olympic running career. The story explains his thoughts and actions with a cinematic detail. You see the rise and fall of all his races. After a while it does seem to be a little forged at times but it does help make the overall story a little more interesting and engaging. 

Then the book started to get into Louie’s wartime experience. It began with the tale of his training, going through the process he went through before he was even allowed to go to combat. The one thing that really spoke to me during this part was the introduction of the comradeship that Louie’s bomber crew started to develop. A lot of the wartime stories I have heard touch on the camaraderie that the soldiers developed in training and on the battlefield and the friendship talked about in this book has a similar feel to it. People are thrown together and work together to survive. They train together so they can feel confident in the person covering them out on the lines. The fact that Louie befriended his pilot and really started to trust him proves that friendship can happen anywhere at any time. 

Another very intriguing thing was the statistics and numbers riddled throughout the book. During training there is a full page just on the stats of the amount of training deaths during World War Two. Some of them seem pretty surprising but if you really think about it, it does make sense. Which is really quite humbling, you realize that a lot of pilots and crews never even reach the battlefield, let along leave their home country. It gives you a sense of true sorrow for all those lives lost. 

After Louie’s training he heads to Hawaii. There he leaves for his first mission. He came to the airfield and saw the vast amount of gear for each plane. “a long hop somewhere” was the way he put it when he wrote in his diary. They bombed the island of Wake. One of the crew members called it “a star storm”. This was one of many bombing runs Louie and his crew would make in their plane “Superman”. A while later a bomber went missing near the island they were stationed on, so Louie and his crew, which had been refreshed since a few members were in the hospital with injuries sustained from a Zero attack, took off in a plane that was used by the mechanics as a source for spare parts. That plane then crash landed into the ocean which resulted in the majority of the crew member’s deaths. Only three people survived; Louie, Mac and Phil. 

They spent 47 days on a raft in the Pacific Ocean trying to get water and food. Although they were hoping for other people, they were found by the Japanese. They were then sent to Japan to a secret POW camp that was unlisted and was a camp for the Japanese to torture and interrogate soldiers they thought had information. It was a horrible camp with horrible conditions. The POWs were given little food and close to no medical help. There were maggots and lice everywhere. They spent their days wandering around camp trying to find food, trying to get any news about the war and creating any kind of mischief to get back at their captors. 

Then on September 30 1944 Louie and a few other POWs were transferred to an official POW camp called Omori. There he met the subject of his nightmares after the war. A corporal named Mutsuhiro “The Bird” Watanabe. The Bird made it his mission to destroy the soul of Louie. He spent day and night beating him and making him more miserable than he had felt at the previous camp. 

After the war Louie spent a lot of time drinking. He had nightmares almost every night and he struggled greatly with dealing with what he saw. The description of Louie’s life in the years after the war was really amazing. I also really liked the scope the book took, with him dealing with PTSD and how he got out of it and continued to try to enjoy life. In the last few pages you realize that it is winding down and you start to look and think about your own family members and what they went through in the war or in other wars and you can almost feel a sympathy for Louie but also feel really happy with the way his life turned out. There is one line, near the end, that I really remembered and enjoyed reading. “When Louie was in his sixties, he was still climbing Cahuenga Peak every week and running a mile in under six minutes. In his seventies, he discovered skateboarding.” 

Although Unbroken seemed a little cinematic and predictable at times I still really appreciated the tale of a man who was sent through the worst experience I have ever heard of and lived to tell the tale. Louie and his story was a powerful one that should be heard and has been heard by the masses and shows that no matter how bad a situation can get. You can always get out of it, you just have to find a way how.