Louis Zamparini, enjoying a 2008 Ellis Island ceremony with actor Gary Sinisi, is the hero at the center of "Unbroken." He will be 94 in January.By James F. Sweeney
There is a scene in "Unbroken" that reads as if it were plucked from a cliffhanger serial. Louis Zamperini and two other World War II aviators have crashed into the Pacific and been adrift for weeks:
"The rafts were beginning to deteriorate into jelly, and gave off a sour, burning odor. The men's bodies were pocked with salt sores, and their lips were so swollen that they pressed into their nostrils and chins. They spent their days with their eyes fixed on the sky, singing 'White Christmas,' muttering about food. No one was even looking for them anymore."
When a plane appears, it is Japanese, and strafes the men with machine-gun fire.
Starving and dehydrated, Zamperini jumps overboard and dives to what he hopes is a safe depth. As the bullets cut through the water around him, he twists in the current, clinging to a cord tied to the bottom of the raft. Then sharks attack. Keeping one hand on the cord, he punches and kicks the sharks before dragging himself back into the raft. The bomber returns. Again and again, Zamperini is forced into the shark-infested water.
Just as in the serials, our hero survives. Not only the sharks and strafing, but 47 days of subsisting on rainwater, fish and birds. Then the Japanese capture Zamperini and his fellow flier (one man died on the raft) and imprison them in unspeakably brutal camps.
Unbroken, Random House, 473 pp., $27Laura Hillenbrand, author of "Seabiscuit," has found another hero in Zamperini. A delinquent growing up in suburban Los Angeles, Zamperini had a gift for speed that came in handy for fleeing angry neighbors and shopkeepers. He ran in the 1936 Summer Olympics in Berlin (where he asked Joseph Goebbels to take a picture of Hitler for him); and, at the University of Southern California, he set the record for the fastest NCAA mile. Many predicted he would become the first man to run a four-minute mile.
Instead, he was drafted into the Army Air Corps in 1940. He was assigned to a B-24 Liberator, a bomber known to its crews as "The Flying Coffin" for its tendency to crash. His plane, Green Hornet, went down on May 27, 1943, searching for another missing aircraft.
Zamperini's incredible will to survive carried him through more than two years of torture, beatings, starvation, slave labor, dysentery, beriberi and relentless humiliation. Freed at the end of the war, he returned to a family that had been told that he had died.
Not surprisingly, Zamperini suffered nightmares and flashbacks. He numbed himself with alcohol. How, with the help of the Rev. Billy Graham, he leaned to forgive his captors and come to terms with what he had endured is the last and most moving part of the book.
Zamperini will turn 94 in January. He gave Hillenbrand many hours of interviews, but she stays out of his head, preferring to write a straightforward narrative. She keeps the tale racing along, but the inner struggle that allowed her subject to survive is unclear.
Still, Hillenbrand writes crisply, allowing the extraordinary events to speak for themselves. Here she records the prisoners' reaction to food dropped into the camp after the surrender of Japan:
"Men crammed their stomachs full, then had seconds and thirds. Louie opened a can of condensed split pea soup and shoveled it into his mouth, too hungry to add water. O.J. Young and two friends drank two gallons of cocoa. The food kept falling."
Like "Seabiscuit," "Unbroken" will keep readers awash in admiration for its hero and marveling at how much a strong spirit can overcome.
James F. Sweeney is a critic in Fairview Park, Ohio