Unbroken

Find it.

Read it.

It’s not often that I feel this way about a book. Usually if someone picks up a book because I made it sound appealing, I feel a little nervous. But with Unbroken, I believe that whoever you are, whatever you’re living through, however busy you are, you’ll love it.

What a book! I want so much to talk about it — to write about the events it recounts, my favorite parts, the ways it inspires me, the ways it overwhelms me. But I would hate to dilute its power by giving anything away. I read it without knowing anything beyond what the cover says: it’s “a World War II story of survival, resillience, and redemption.” I knew also that its main character was a person I’d never heard of: Louis Zamperini, an Olympic runner who became a World War II Air Force bombardier. It just might be that part of the reason I couldn’t put the book down was that I really didn’t know all the twists and turns Zamperini’s (true) story would take.

It’s not just the great story that blows me away, though that would be enough. It’s that the story is so well-told it leaves me in awe. The comprehensiveness of Laura Hillenbrand’s research, conducted over a 7-year period, combined with flawlessly paced writing, does justice to its subject. The older I get, and the more I read, the more amazed I am by some authors. When I was younger, I felt confident that I could subject any book to my tastes and analyses. Now I cringe that I could have had such hubris. The best authors go so far beyond anything I could ever do myself that I simply feel humbled reading them.

There are plenty of reviews around that provide fuller plot summaries if that’s what you’re looking for. I’m afraid all you’ll find here is raving enthusiasm. Ask my family; I told them the entire story at the dinner table last night. Ask my husband, who knows I usually fade by 10 PM, but who has been finding me still wide awake and reading at midnight.

Incidentally, this is the first book I’ve read all the way through on my Kindle. None of the books I’ve started on it have really caught my fancy, and I have struggled with the smallness of the Kindle page; I’m used to being awash in a sea of print splashed across two pages at a time. But Unbroken got me past my land-locked feeling. It’s the kind of tale you could get lost in if it were written on a pile of gum wrappers, the story is so absorbing. I can’t recommend it highly enough.