Unbroken [electronic resource] : A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption

Title:

Author:

Hillenbrand, Laura.

Description:

-- Seabiscuit is a testament to the resilience of the human mind, body, and spirit.

Publisher:

Random House Publishing Group,

Date:

2010

Digital Format:

CLOUDLIBRARY EPUB

Language:

English

Summary

#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER * The incredible true story of survival and salvation that is the basis for two major motion pictures: Unbroken and Unbroken: Path to Redemption .

"Extraordinarily moving . . . a powerfully drawn survival epic."-- The Wall Street Journal

Hailed as the top nonfiction book of the year by Time magazine * Winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for biography

On a May afternoon in 1943, an Army Air Forces bomber crashed into the Pacific Ocean and disappeared, leaving only a spray of debris and a slick of oil, gasoline, and blood. Then, on the ocean surface, a face appeared. It was that of a young lieutenant, the plane's bombardier, who was struggling to a life raft and pulling himself aboard. So began one of the most extraordinary odysseys of the Second World War.

The lieutenant's name was Louis Zamperini. In boyhood, he'd been a cunning and incorrigible delinquent, breaking into houses, brawling, and fleeing his home to ride the rails. As a teenager, he had channeled his defiance into running, discovering a prodigious talent that had carried him to the Berlin Olympics and within sight of the four-minute mile. But when war had come, the athlete had become an airman, embarking on a journey that led to his doomed flight, a tiny raft, and a drift into the unknown.

Ahead of Zamperini lay thousands of miles of open ocean, leaping sharks, a foundering raft, thirst and starvation, enemy aircraft, and, beyond, a trial even greater. Driven to the limits of endurance, Zamperini would answer desperation with ingenuity; suffering with hope, resolve, and humor; brutality with rebellion. His fate, whether triumph or tragedy, would be suspended on the fraying wire of his will.

Laura Hillenbrand writes with the same rich and vivid narrative voice she displayed in Seabiscuit . Telling an unforgettable story of a man's journey into extremity, Unbroken is a testament to the resilience of the human mind, body, and spirit.

Reviews (6)

Publisher's Weekly Review

From the 1936 Olympics to WWII Japan's most brutal POW camps, Hillenbrand's heart-wrenching new book is thousands of miles and a world away from the racing circuit of her bestselling Seabiscuit. But it's just as much a page-turner, and its hero, Louie Zamperini, is just as loveable: a disciplined champion racer who ran in the Berlin Olympics, he's a wit, a prankster, and a reformed juvenile delinquent who put his thieving skills to good use in the POW camps, In other words, Louie is a total charmer, a lover of life-whose will to live is cruelly tested when he becomes an Army Air Corps bombardier in 1941. The young Italian-American from Torrance, Calif., was expected to be the first to run a four-minute mile. After an astonishing but losing race at the 1936 Olympics, Louie was hoping for gold in the 1940 games. But war ended those dreams forever. In May 1943 his B-24 crashed into the Pacific. After a record-breaking 47 days adrift on a shark-encircled life raft with his pal and pilot, Russell Allen "Phil" Phillips, they were captured by the Japanese. In the "theater of cruelty" that was the Japanese POW camp network, Louie landed in the cruelest theaters of all: Omori and Naoetsu, under the control of Corp. Mutsuhiro Watanabe, a pathologically brutal sadist (called the Bird by camp inmates) who never killed his victims outright-his pleasure came from their slow, unending torment. After one beating, as Watanabe left Louie's cell, Louie saw on his face a "soft languor.... It was an expression of sexual rapture." And Louie, with his defiant and unbreakable spirit, was Watanabe's victim of choice. By war's end, Louie was near death. When Naoetsu was liberated in mid-August 1945, a depleted Louie's only thought was "I'm free! I'm free! I'm free!" But as Hillenbrand shows, Louie was not yet free. Even as, returning stateside, he impulsively married the beautiful Cynthia Applewhite and tried to build a life, Louie remained in the Bird's clutches, haunted in his dreams, drinking to forget, and obsessed with vengeance. In one of several sections where Hillenbrand steps back for a larger view, she writes movingly of the thousands of postwar Pacific PTSD sufferers. With no help for their as yet unrecognized illness, Hillenbrand says, "there was no one right way to peace; each man had to find his own path...." The book's final section is the story of how, with Cynthia's help, Louie found his path. It is impossible to condense the rich, granular detail of Hillenbrand's narrative of the atrocities committed (one man was exhibited naked in a Tokyo zoo for the Japanese to "gawk at his filthy, sore-encrusted body") against American POWs in Japan, and the courage of Louie and his fellow POWs, who made attempts on Watanabe's life, committed sabotage, and risked their own lives to save others. Hillenbrand's triumph is that in telling Louie's story (he's now in his 90s), she tells the stories of thousands whose suffering has been mostly forgotten. She restores to our collective memory this tale of heroism, cruelty, life, death, joy, suffering, remorselessness, and redemption. (Nov.) -Reviewed by Sarah F. Gold (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

Booklist Review

A second book by the author of Seabiscuit (2001) would get noticed, even if it weren't the enthralling and often grim story of Louie Zamperini. An Olympic runner during the 1930s, he flew B-24s during WWII. Taken prisoner by the Japanese, he endured a captivity harsh even by Japanese standards and was a physical and mental wreck at the end of the war. He was saved by the influence of Billy Graham, who inspired him to turn his life around, and afterward devoted himself to evangelical speeches and founding boys' camps. Still alive at 93, Zamperini now works with those Japanese individuals and groups who accept responsibility for Japanese mistreatment of POWs and wish to see Japan and the U.S. reconciled. He submitted to 75 interviews with the author as well as contributing a large mass of personal records. Fortunately, the author's skills are as polished as ever, and like its predecessor, this book has an impossible-to-put-down quality that one commonly associates with good thrillers. HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: This departure from the author's previous best-seller will nevertheless be promoted as necessary reading for the many folks who enjoyed the first one or its movie version.--Green, Roland Copyright 2010 Booklist

New York Review of Books Review

I STILL REMEMBER reading books to my own kids, teenagers now, but I don't remember the last time someone read me a book, or even a paragraph, other than my husband barking out a snippet of the day's outrageous news. Yet I've never forgotten how different the experience of listening to prose is from reading or watching it transformed into film. It requires time and a mental stillness, the kind one has these days mainly in cars or other modes of transit. And so I set out to listen to the audio of young readers' versions of best-selling nonfiction in the car on trips upstate, often with my 13-year-old along to test their Y.A. appeal. We began with Michael Pollan's "The Omnivore's Dilemma," read by the actor Macleod Andrews in a vaguely Midwestern, boyish cadence. I was one of those people who had avoided Pollan's book when it came out a decade back, certain that if I read it, I'd wake up not just rejecting high-fructose corn syrup but also unable to find sustenance anywhere in my country, or worse, morphed into an organic-baby-food-producing, vegan scold. Listening to the nightmarish story of American industrial farming - the tragedy of ghost towns in Iowa and the Midwest all given over to "America's 80-million-acre field of corn," a plant that Pollan compares to an alien invasion - was indeed disturbing. When he buys a steer to chart its journey to becoming meat, you know it won't end well, but what happens is even worse than you think. At one point, listening to the unfolding litany of disaster that is America's food system, the kid in the car opined that my generation "let this happen." I denied it, of course, but as a native Illinoisan who spent a few summers on chain gangs of teenage corn "de-tassellers" toiling in Cargill's cross-pollination fields, I suppose I am personally implicated in the fiasco. Tip: You might want to listen to this seven-and-a-half-hour book (the adult audio clocks in at nearly 16 hours) while on a long drive with your family, but you won't be able to stop and eat at the fast-food outlets serving the disgusting things Pollan calls "EFLS" - edible foodlike substances constructed with corn and sickly factory-farmed cow or chicken. So pack a picnic basket of organic goodies from the farmers market before setting off. After Pollan, we popped the marvelous work of Laura Hillenbrand into the CD player. The actor Edward Herrmann (who died in 2014) reads a shorter, Y.A.-friendly version of "Unbroken," the true story of the Olympic runner and P.O.W. Louis Zamperini. Hillenbrand begins with our hero, his plane having gone down in the Pacific, floating on a life raft encircled by sharks. She leaves him there and drifts back to the delinquent boy discovering he was the fastest runner in Torrance, Calif. Before long he is racing the 5,000-meter in the 1936 Olympics and meeting Hitler, then enlisting in the Army Air Corps, crashing, spending a record 47 days on that shark-encircled raft and entering a hellish Japanese P.O.W. camp. Hillenbrand is a true master of the English language (planes "etch" the sky, sharks "bristle" beneath the raft), and her writerly skill is delivered with a feel for the eras in which the book unfolds by Herrmann's orotund, World War II radio announcer voice, his accent just slightly out of time. I was so into this story that when I reached home as Zamperini was being shot at by the Japanese, I brought the CD out of the car and hurried it inside with me, to finish listening. Our third and fourth audiobooks didn't grip us like the first two. "The Boys in the Boat," by Daniel James Brown, is about the Depression-era Olympic gold-medal-winning United States rowing team. The five-and-a-half-hour audio of the version adapted for younger readers, read by the actor Mark Bramhall, is heavily veiled by fog and endlessly dripping cold rain as the author paints the Pacific Northwest setting. Marketed as a sort of natural companion to Hillenbrand's book, it lacks her sharp ear for language, and although it was a best seller, it's not clear why the world needed another book about how the Americans triumphed over Nazi Germany in the 1936 Olympics. The book is, however, evocative of the incredible hardship Americans endured during the Depression, and it strikes deep emotional chords: Before the first third of the story is over, the hero, Joe Rantz, has been abandoned by his family three times. We learn that he and the other rowers, working-class boys all, formed a "mystical bond" in the boat that they never forgot. Unfortunately, "Quiet Power: The Secret Strengths of Introverts," by Susan Cain with Gregory Mone and Erica Moroz, didn't capture us either. We do have introverts in our household, and Cain explains that "a quiet temperament is a superpower," which is a nice way to look at it. But there's a gooey dose of psychobabble here, even presumably simplified for young people in this reworking of the adult book, along with a protest-too-much degree of reassurance that introverts are just as smart and worthy as extroverts. Perhaps there are people out there who don't already believe that, but we're not among them. There is a 24-question test by which the listener can determine what sort of "vert" he or she is, which might not be immediately obvious. I took it and found myself exactly in the middle - a so-called androvert, sort of surprising because I was a shy and bookish teenager. The book is full of tips for more introverted teenagers on how to navigate the noisy world, including finding a few close friends and accepting that "you might not get up in front of a stadium like Taylor Swift." The most interesting anecdote the self-described introvert Cain shares is that she came to realize that being quiet means people often listen more closely when she speaks. But the book, at least, isn't helped by its reader, the actress Kathe Mazur. My 13-year-old test-listener observed, "She has a voice that makes me want to go to sleep. You should write that." And so I have. NINA BURLEIGH is the national politics correspondent at Newsweek magazine and the author of five nonfiction books.

Guardian Review

We have become accustomed to a fast literary turnaround in our wars recently. The troops are not back in their barracks, the guns not cold, before the first bestsellers hit the shelves. Later will come the memoirs. And as for the old wars, some catch the public imagination and some do not. The first world war and, before it, the Napoleonic wars have managed to lodge themselves deep in our consciousness, while dozens of others have failed. Perhaps that is why I felt a little surprised to see the subject of Laura Hillenbrand's new book, an epic of individual heroism and fortitude in the second world war. Weren't all those tales told in the 1950s and 60s, I wondered. Apparently not, but one must wait until the final quarter of this book to realise why the true breadth and significance of the story had to wait so long to be revealed. Louis Silvie Zamperini was born in 1917, son of Italian immigrant parents in Torrance, California. He was a wild and wilful child, and not until he was 14 did anyone find an activity that would focus him. It was his elder brother, Pete, who thought of it: athletics. Zamperini junior roared out of the blocks and almost immediately began smashing collegiate, state and finally national records for the mile. At 19 he muddled his way into the US Olympic team for the wrong event, the 5,000m, at the very last opportunity, and within days was on a steamer heading for the 1936 Berlin Olympics. He was a cheerful and charismatic mixed-up kid who couldn't resist stealing ashtrays from the bar. He came eighth in the final, shook hands with Hitler, and went home determined to win Olympic gold for the mile at Tokyo in 1940. No one doubted it was possible. He would also be the first, said many experts at the time, to break the four-minute barrier. Instead there was Pearl Harbor. Zamperini was drafted into the air force as a bombardier and started flying missions over the Pacific. He still kept up his training, however, and on 27 May 1943, running alone on sand in Hawaii, he clocked 4:12. He knew he could go much faster, but it was to be his last run for many years. That same day, while his plane was searching for lost airmen over the ocean, it crashed and immediately sank. So began a 47-day story of survival in which three men, reduced later to two, drifted 2,000 miles on a leaky liferaft, fought off sharks and survived Japanese air attacks. Anyone who enjoyed Hillenbrand's previous book, Seabiscuit, will know that she has a fine line in compelling narrative. Unbroken is no different: meticulously researched and powerful. The reader, unlike the airmen, would rather the days adrift went on longer. They end, however, in grim style. Zamperini and fellow survivor are in sight of land when they are captured by Japanese forces. The Red Cross, however, is never informed and the two are declared dead. Incarceration as a PoW, especially if taken by the Japanese, was a horrible business. Zamperini found himself beaten and humiliated with appalling regularity by one particular guard, Mitsuhiro Watanabe, nicknamed "the Bird" by the prisoners. Occasionally he was made to run against Japanese to prove their superiority. If he won, he was bludgeoned into unconsciousness. Dysentery and beri-beri wore him down, as did the guard's sadistic attacks. By the end of the war, his life was hanging by a thread. This book shows that recollections in later life can be vastly superior to any cash-in-quick responses to dramatic events. In Zamperini, still alive at 93, Hillenbrand has discovered a man of complexity and wisdom who can look back from his great age and see the pattern of his life emerge. The evidence of this is revealed almost as soon as Zamperini arrives back in the US in 1945 as a hero. Feted and dined, he floats on a bubble of incomprehension about his experiences. He toys with the idea of restarting a track career but soon discovers that his legs, damaged in repeated beatings and accidents, cannot do the job. He drinks. He tries investing in various wacky schemes. Spiralling downwards, he becomes obsessed with the idea of returning to Japan and killing his former tormentor. In one remarkable passage, Hillenbrand delves into the psychology of revenge. "Louis believed that only the Bird could restore him, by suffering and dying in the grip of his hands. A once singularly hopeful man now believed that his only hope lay in murder." Here is the story that few PoW books have bothered to tell: of a man struggling to escape an inescapable past. There are no tunnels, no mass breakouts, no climbing the wire. This is an altogether more secure prison and the chief torturer is his own mind. What makes the story so fascinating is the parallel tale that Hillenbrand has unearthed, of Watanabe on the run in rural Japan after the war. It was a Daily Mail journalist, Paul Hadfield, who finally cornered him in 1995. He was married and living as a successful insurance broker in a swanky apartment, a man not unrepentant, but not fully redeemed either. Back in California, Zamperini had managed to kick the bottle and start again. Having forgiven Watanabe, he reached some kind of inner peace and even carried the torch for the 1998 Winter Olympics in Japan. Watanabe avoided a last meeting, but that final touch of drama is not necessary for this outstanding book. With it Hillenbrand marches second world war literature right back into the spotlight. Kevin Rushby's Paradise is published by Robinson. To order Unbroken for pounds 16 with free UK p&p call Guardian book service on 0330 333 6846 or go to guardian.co.uk/bookshop - Kevin Rushby Incarceration as a PoW, especially if taken by the Japanese, was a horrible business. [Louis Silvie Zamperini] found himself beaten and humiliated with appalling regularity by one particular guard, Mitsuhiro Watanabe, nicknamed "the Bird" by the prisoners. Occasionally he was made to run against Japanese to prove their superiority. If he won, he was bludgeoned into unconsciousness. Dysentery and beri-beri wore him down, as did the guard's sadistic attacks. By the end of the war, his life was hanging by a thread. The evidence of this is revealed almost as soon as Zamperini arrives back in the US in 1945 as a hero. Feted and dined, he floats on a bubble of incomprehension about his experiences. He toys with the idea of restarting a track career but soon discovers that his legs, damaged in repeated beatings and accidents, cannot do the job. He drinks. He tries investing in various wacky schemes. Spiralling downwards, he becomes obsessed with the idea of returning to Japan and killing his former tormentor. In one remarkable passage, [Laura Hillenbrand] delves into the psychology of revenge. "Louis believed that only the Bird could restore him, by suffering and dying in the grip of his hands. A once singularly hopeful man now believed that his only hope lay in murder." - Kevin Rushby.

Kirkus Review

The author of Seabiscuit (2001) returns with another dynamic, well-researched story of guts overcoming odds.Hillenbrand examines the life of Louis Zamperini, an American airman who, after his bomber crashed in the Pacific during World War II, survived 47 days on a life raft only to be captured by Japanese soldiers and subjected to inhuman treatment for the next two years at a series of POW camps. That his life spiraled out of control when he returned home to the United States is understandable. However, he was able to turn it around after meeting Billy Graham, and he became a Christian speaker and traveled to Japan to forgive his tormentors. The author reconstructs Zamperini's wild youth, when his hot temper, insubordination, and bold pranks seemed to foretell a future life of crime. His talents as a runner, however, changed all that, getting him to the 1936 Olympics and to the University of Southern California, where he was a star of the track team. When the story turns to World War II, Hillenbrand expands her narrative to include men who served with him in the Air Corps in the Pacific. Through letters and interviews, she brings to life not just the men who were with Zamperini on the life raft and in the Japanese camps, but the families they left behind. The suffering of the men is often difficult to read, for the details of starvation, thirst and shark attacks are followed by the specifics of the brutalities inflicted by the Japanese, particularly the sadistic Mutsuhiro Watanabe, who seemed dedicated to making Zamperini's life unbearable. Hillenbrand follows Watanabe's life after the Japanese surrender, providing the perfect foil to Zamperini's. When Zamperini wrote to his former tormentor to forgive him and attempted to meet him in person, Watanabe rejected him. Throughout are photographs of World War II bombers, POW camps, Zamperini and his fellow GIs and their families and sweethearts, providing a glimpse into a bygone era. Zamperini is still thriving at age 93.Alternately stomach-wrenching, anger-arousing and spirit-liftingand always gripping.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Library Journal Review

Hillenbrand (www.laurahillenbrandbooks.com), author of Seabiscuit (2003)-also available from Books on Tape/Random Audio-presents another extensively researched and compellingly written tale of steadfastness. At the centerpiece of this historical biography set during World War II is Louis Zamperini, a one-time U.S. Olympics distance runner-turned-Army Air Force bombardier whose plane goes down over the Pacific. Emmy Award-winning actor Edward Herrmann, who frequently does voice-over work for the History Channel, uses his rich voice to infuse Hillenbrand's tale with a palpable dramatic flavor, casting Zamperini as a symbol of the American ethos. Recommended for those interested in World War II and American history and for anyone liking Seabiscuit. [The LJ and New York Times best-selling Random hc was recommended "for general readers who like a good story and for World War II history buffs," LJ 10/1/10.-Ed.]-Christopher Rager, Pasadena, CA (c) Copyright 2011. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

Excerpts

Chapter One The One-Boy Insurgency In the predawn darkness of August 26, 1929, in the back bedroom of a small house inTorrance, California, a twelve-year-old boy sat up in bed, listening. There was a sound coming from outside, growing ever louder. It was a huge, heavy rush, suggesting immensity, a great parting of air. It was coming from directly above the house. The boy swung his legs off his bed, raced down the stairs, slapped open the back door, and loped onto the grass. The yard was otherworldly, smothered in unnatural darkness, shivering with sound. The boy stood on the lawn beside his older brother, head thrown back, spellbound. The sky had disappeared. An object that he could see only in silhouette, reaching across a massive arc of space, was suspended low in theair over the house. It was longer than two and a half football fields and as tall as a city. It was putting out the stars. What he saw was the German dirigible Graf Zeppelin. At nearly 800 feet long and 110 feet high, it was the largest flying machine evercrafted. More luxurious than the finest airplane, gliding effortlessly over huge distances, built on a scale that left spectators gasping, it was, in the summer of '29, the wonder of the world. The airship was three days from completing a sensational feat of aeronautics, circumnavigation of the globe. The journey had begun onAugust 7, when the Zeppelin had slipped its tethers in Lakehurst, New Jersey, lifted up with a long, slow sigh, and headed for Manhattan. On Fifth Avenue that summer, demolition was soon to begin on the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel, clearing the way for a skyscraper of unprecedented proportions, the Empire State Building. At Yankee Stadium, in the Bronx, players were debuting numbered uniforms: Lou Gehrig wore No. 4; Babe Ruth, about to hit his five hundredth home run, wore No. 3. On Wall Street, stock prices were racing toward an all-time high. After a slow glide around the Statue of Liberty, the Zeppelin banked north, then turned out over the Atlantic. In time, land came below again: France, Switzerland, Germany. The ship passed over Nuremberg, where fringe politician Adolf Hitler, whose Nazi Party had been trounced in the 1928 elections, had just delivered a speech touting selective infanticide. Then it flew east of Frankfurt, where a Jewish woman named Edith Frank was caring for her newborn, a girl named Anne. Sailing northeast, the Zeppelin crossed over Russia. Siberian villagers, so isolated that they'd never even seen a train, fell to their knees at the sight of it. On August 19, as some four million Japanese waved handkerchiefs and shouted "Banzai!" the Zeppelin circled Tokyo and sank onto a landing field. Four days later, as the German and Japanese anthems played, the ship rose into the grasp of a typhoon that whisked it over the Pacific at breathtaking speed, toward America. Passengers gazing from the windows saw only the ship's shadow, following it along the clouds "like a huge shark swimming alongside." When the clouds parted, the passengers glimpsed giant creatures, turning in the sea, that looked like monsters. On August 25, the Zeppelin reached San Francisco. After being cheered down the California coast, it slid through sunset, into darkness and silence, and across midnight. As slow as the drifting wind, it passed over Torrance, where its only audience was a scattering of drowsy souls, among them the boy in his pajamas behind the house on Gramercy Avenue. Standing under the airship, his feet bare in the grass, he was transfixed. It was, he would say, "fearfully beautiful." He could feel the rumble of the craft's engines tilling the air but couldn't make out the silver skin, the sweeping ribs, the finned tail. He could see only the blackness of the space it inhabited. It was not a great presence but a great absence, a geometric ocean of darkness that seemed to swallow heaven itself. The boy's name was Louis Silvie Zamperini. The son of Italian immigrants, he had come into the world in Olean, New York, on January 26, 1917, eleven and a half pounds of baby under black hair as coarse as barbed wire. His father, Anthony, had been living on his own since age fourteen, first as a coal miner and boxer, then as a construction worker. His mother, Louise, was a petite, playful beauty, sixteen at marriage and eighteen when Louie was born. In their apartment, where only Italian was spoken, Louise and Anthony called their boy Toots. From the moment he could walk, Louie couldn't bear to be corralled. His siblings would recall him careening about, hurdling flora, fauna, and furniture. The instant Louise thumped him into a chair and told him to be still, he vanished. If she didn't have her squirming boy clutched in her hands, she usually had no idea where he was. In 1919, when two-year-old Louie was down with pneumonia, he climbed out his bedroom window, descended one story, and went on a naked tear down the street with a policeman chasing him and a crowd watching in amazement. Soon after, on a pediatrician's advice, Louise and Anthony decided to move their children to the warmer climes of California. Sometime after their train pulled out of Grand Central Station, Louie bolted, ran the length of the train, and leapt from the caboose. Standing with his frantic mother as the train rolled backward in search of the lost boy, Louie's older brother, Pete, spotted Louie strolling up the track in perfect serenity. Swept up in his mother's arms, Louie smiled. "I knew you'd come back," he said in Italian. In California, Anthony landed a job as a railway electrician and bought a half-acre field on the edge of Torrance, population 1,800. He and Louise hammered up a one-room shack with no running water, an outhouse behind, and a roof that leaked so badly that they had to keep buckets on the beds. With only hook latches for locks, Louise took to sitting by the front door on an apple box with a rolling pin in her hand, ready to brain any prowlers who might threaten her children. There, and at the Gramercy Avenue house where they settled a year later, Louise kept prowlers out, but couldn't keep Louie in hand. Contesting a footrace across a busy highway, he just missed getting broadsided by a jalopy. At five, he started smoking, picking up discarded cigarette butts while walking to kindergarten. He began drinking one night when he was eight; he hid under the dinner table, snatched glasses of wine, drank them all dry, staggered outside, and fell into a rosebush. On one day, Louise discovered that Louie had impaled his leg on a bamboo beam; on another, she had to ask a neighbor to sew Louie's severed toe back on. When Louie came home drenched in oil after scaling an oil rig, diving into a sump well, and nearly drowning, it took a gallon of turpentine and a lot of scrubbing before Anthony recognized his son again. Thrilled by the crashing of boundaries, Louie was untamable. As he grew into his uncommonly clever mind, mere feats of daring were no longer satisfying. In Torrance, a one-boy insurgency was born. If it was edible, Louie stole it. He skulked down alleys, a roll of lock-picking wire in his pocket. Housewives who stepped from their kitchens would return to find that their suppers had disappeared. Residents looking out their back windows might catch a glimpse of a long-legged boy dashing down the alley, a whole cake balanced on his hands. When a local family left Louie off their dinner-party guest list, he broke into their house, bribed their Great Dane with a bone, and cleaned out their icebox. At another party,he absconded with an entire keg of beer. When he discovered that the cooling tables at Meinzer's Bakery stood within an arm's length of the back door, he began picking the lock, snatching pies, eating until he was full, and reserving the rest as ammunition for ambushes. When rival thieves took up the racket, he suspended the stealing until the culprits were caught and the bakery owners dropped their guard. Then he ordered his friends to rob Meinzer's again. It is a testament to the content of Louie's childhood that his stories about it usually ended with "...and then I ran like mad." He was often chased by people he had robbed, and at least two people threatened to shoot him. To minimize the evidence found on him when the police habitually came his way, he set up loot-stashing sites around town, including a three-seater cave that he dug in a nearby forest. Under the Torrance High bleachers, Pete once found a stolen wine jug that Louie had hidden there. It was teeming with inebriated ants. In the lobby of the Torrance theater, Louie stopped up the pay telephone's coin slots with toilet paper. He returned regularly to feedwire behind the coins stacked up inside, hook the paper, and fill his palms with change. A metal dealer never guessed that the grinning Italian kid who often came by to sell him armfuls of copper scrap had stolen the same scrap from his lot the night before. Discovering, while scuffling with an enemy at a circus, that adults would give quarters to fighting kids to pacify them, Louie declared a truce with the enemy and they cruised around staging brawls before strangers. To get even with a railcar conductor who wouldn't stop for him, Louie greased the rails. When a teacher made him stand in a corner for spitballing, he deflated her car tires with toothpicks. After setting a legitimate Boy Scout state record in friction-fire ignition, he broke his record by soaking his tinder in gasoline and mixing it with match heads, causing a small explosion. He stole a neighbor's coffee percolator tube, set up a sniper's nest in a tree, crammed pepper-tree berries into his mouth, spat them through the tube, and sent the neighborhood girls running. His magnum opus became legend. Late one night, Louie climbed the steeple of a Baptist church, rigged the bell with piano wire, strung the wire into a nearby tree, and roused the police, the fire department, and all of Torrance with apparently spontaneous pealing. The more credulous townsfolk called it a sign from God. Only one thing scared him. When Louie was in late boyhood, a pilot landed a plane near Torrance and took Louie up for a flight. One might have expected such an intrepid child to be ecstatic, but the speed and altitude frightened him. From that day on, he wanted nothing to do with airplanes. In a childhood of artful dodging, Louie made more than just mischief. He shaped who he would be in manhood. Confident that he was clever, resourceful, and bold enough to escape any predicament, he was almost incapable of discouragement. When history carried him into war, this resilient optimism would define him. Louie was twenty months younger than his brother, who was everything he was not. Pete Zamperini was handsome, popular, impeccably groomed, polite to elders and avuncular to juniors, silky smooth with girls, and blessed with such sound judgment that even when he was a child, his parents consulted him on difficult decisions. He ushered his mother into her seat at dinner, turned in at seven, and tucked his alarm clock under his pillow so as not to wake Louie, with whom he shared a bed. He rose at two-thirty to run a three-hour paper route, and deposited all his earnings in the bank, which would swallow every penny when the Depression hit. He had a lovely singing voice and a gallant habit of carrying pins in his pant cuffs, in case his dance partner's dress strap failed. He once saved a girl from drowning. Pete radiated a gentle but impressive authority that led everyone he met, even adults, to be swayed by his opinion. Even Louie, who made a religion out of heeding no one, did as Pete said. Louie idolized Pete, who watched over him and their younger sisters, Sylvia and Virginia, with paternal protectiveness. But Louie was eclipsed, and he never heard the end of it. Sylvia would recall her mother tearfully telling Louie how she wished he could be more like Pete. What made it more galling was that Pete's reputation was part myth. Though Pete earned grades little better than Louie's failing ones, his principal assumed that he was a straight-A student. On the night of Torrance's church bell miracle, a well-directed flashlight would have revealed Pete's legs dangling from the tree alongside Louie's. And Louie wasn't always the only Zamperini boy who could be seen sprinting down the alley with food that had lately belonged to the neighbors. But it never occurred to anyone to suspect Pete of anything. "Pete never got caught," said Sylvia. "Louie always got caught." Nothing about Louie fit with other kids. He was a puny boy, and in his first years in Torrance, his lungs were still compromised enough from the pneumonia that in picnic footraces, every girl in town could dust him. His features, which would later settle into pleasant collaboration, were growing at different rates, giving him a curious face that seemed designed by committee. His ears leaned sidelong off his head like holstered pistols, and above them waved a calamity of black hair that mortified him. He attacked it with his aunt Margie's hot iron, hobbled it in a silk stocking every night, and slathered it with so much olive oil that flies trailed him to school. It did no good. And then there was his ethnicity. In Torrance in the early 1920s, Italians were held in such disdain that when the Zamperinis arrived, the neighbors petitioned the city council to keep them out. Louie, who knew only a smattering of English until he was in grade school, couldn't hide his pedigree. He survived kindergarten by keeping mum, but in first grade, when he blurted out "Brutte bastarde!" at another kid, his teachers caught on. They compounded his misery by holding him back a grade. He was a marked boy. Bullies, drawn by his oddity and hoping to goad him into uttering Italian curses, pelted him with rocks, taunted him, punched him, and kicked him. He tried buying their mercy with his lunch, but they pummeled him anyway, leaving him bloody. He could have ended the beatings by running away or succumbing to tears, but he refused to do either. "You could beat him to death," said Sylvia, "and he wouldn't say 'ouch' or cry." He just put his hands in front of his face and took it. As Louie neared his teens, he took a hard turn. Aloof and bristling, he lurked around the edges of Torrance, his only friendships forged loosely with rough boys who followed his lead. He became so germophobic that he wouldn't tolerate anyone coming near his food. Though he could be a sweet boy, he was often short-tempered and obstreperous. He feigned toughness, but was secretly tormented. Kids passing into parties would see him lingering outside, unable to work up the courage to walk in. From the Hardcover edition. Excerpted from Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption by Laura Hillenbrand All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.