Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption

It should have been a "milk run," as the military put it at the time where a bomber was to fly a search route and if it failed in that search the bomber turned back to base.

It was to have been as simple as that for Louie Zamperini. He was well into his teens when he realized that he was fast on his feet, as in Olympics fast. He performed in the same Olympics where Jesse Owens put flight to the rumors that Germans were the "most perfect race" of people on the planet as African-American Owens beat the vaunted German Olympic team four times on track and field.

Zamperini's prowess was on the track where he went on to work as part of the U.S. wrecking crew that showed the world just how "pure" and "strong" the supposed "Aryan superman" was. German athletes were simply athletes who could perform better than most. However, they certainly weren't supermen, as Hitler would have had the world believe.

Indeed, Zamperini was on the way to becoming the first runner to break the four-minute mile when a small ruckus intervened. It was World War II and Zamperini, being a patriot, joined the Army Air Corps and became a bombardier. His first action says Laura Hillenbrand, best-selling author and biographer of the bandy-legged colt named Seabiscuit, as well as Zamperini's biographer resulted in a bomber whose crew was pretty much shot to pieces with wounds all over and more than 600 bullet holes in the fuselage.

Zamperini was based in Oahu in the Hawaiian chain and spent 1942 and 43 flying special missions. It was on one of those missions that his bomber was shot down and forced to ditch. The next 47 harrowing days would have been a tale in themselves as the small yellow life raft was constantly circled by sharks, some of which even tried climbing aboard the life raft to drag their victims out.

They not only survived that fish tale, but also a strafing run by a Japanese warplane and a typhoon whose 40-foot seas tossed them around like a cork.

Thinking the worst was behind them, the airmen saw an island in the distance and, using the last of their strength, pulled on the life raft's oars for it, only to find, only to find the Japanese waiting there in ambush. That was the beginning of Louie Zamperini's problems as he was put in a unit controlled by a wanton sadist, who enjoyed inflicting slow pain on his charges.

The one thing you can see about Louie is that he never gave up. It was a hellish three years in captivity, but he did make it and on his arrival home, he married and then began to fight his demons again, this time by himself.

No one knew what PTSD (post traumatic stress disease) was and no one knew how to cure it. It took some serious consequences for Louie and his wife Cynthia before they began to work on his problem and bring him back from the limb he was on.

Hillenbrand's biography of Louie Zamperini brings every part of the years before the war, his years as a flight hero and then as a heroic POW. It did take her eight years to get all of the information and put it into order and then work her literary magic. That's the beauty of Hillenbrand's work; it seems effortless when you read it that is the mark of a good writer. The more seamless the writing, the better the writer and Hillenbrand has even bettered herself in the work on Zamperini. After Seabiscuit, one wondered if there was more than just one great book in the writer and with this book about Louis Zamperini, Hillenbrand has earned the title great.