“Laura Hillenbrand, author of Seabiscuit” is exactly what the front cover says, marketing the book based on the author’s reputation and extra name recognition from having had the prior book made into a movie. But you know what? I read Seabiscuit and thought it was very well written, and this book is, too.
The subtitle is “A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption” and unlike my prior “from the library” posts, I’m not going to give a detailed synopsis of the book (I know, I still have to finish Overtreated). The book tells the story of Louis Zamperini, college track star drafted into the Air Force and shot down over the Pacific Ocean. As the subtitle says, he survives — but in the meantime, his fate is pretty horrific. (They won’t be making a movie out of this one, at least not without a lot of sugarcoating.) But between the events themselves and Hillenbrand’s skill at researching and retelling them, this was a “can’t put it down” sort of book of the sort I haven’t read in a long time.
(I don’t really get into fiction — periodically I’ll pre-screen a book my kids are about to read, or occasionally have one land in my lap, but generally I find it to not be compelling since I know that it’s all, well, fictitious.)
It’s the sort of subject matter that, in the hands of a lesser author, would be turned into a first-person treatment (“Louis Zamperini with Laura Hillenbrand”) with large print and lots of photographs. But that’s one of my pet peeves. (I’d like every such “first person” narrative to have a disclaimer: “the subject sat for lengthy interviews and provided feedback for the ghostwriter’s text but didn’t actually write a single word,” for instance. And a book I read a very long time ago, A Mother’s Ordeal: One Woman’s Fight Against China’s One Child Policy, about forced abortion in China, told in first-person format from the vantage point of a woman first enforcing, then affected by the one-child rule, did, in fact, give author credit to the actual author, Stephen W. Mosher, who said, “I wrote this in the first-person because the narrative worked better that way.” Wouldn’t happen any longer, I suspect.)
(*** After having written the above paragraph, I looked at Amazon.com to see what reviews it got, and, turns out, a reviewer linked to the book that Zamperini “authored”, Devil At My Heels. So now I’m curious about how this compares. . . )
Anyway, it’s been given 4.8 stars on Amazon.com, and it deserves every one of them, so take a break from Syria, Obamacare, the debt ceiling, etc., and read this book.
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