You Need to Read This Book!

From Publishers Weekly

Starred 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
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This is a truly amazing tale. I cannot recommend this book enough. It is the epitome of a page-turner. The writing is straight-forward and never tries to impress, which is something I greatly appreciated. Hillenbrand (the author) takes herself out of the picture, allowing you to only be concerned with the people in the book.

I'm an avid reader, but rarely do I implore others to read a specific book. This is an exception. People need to read this book!