Vacations and book reviews

I am back after a minor hiatus.  After some much needed time at the Oregon Coast admiring the beauty of the Pacific Ocean and walking the beagles for miles and miles along the shore, I am back in the swing of everyday life.  Am I happy or sad about this?  The jury is still out.  Let’s just say the return to normalcy was inevitable so I have no choice but to suck it up and start fantasizing about the next vacation.

One of the great and wonderful things about vacation is that you have all this time on your hands to do pretty much whatever you want.  Before leaving on this trip my family and I made all these plans about what we wanted to do at the coast, what sites we wanted to visit, how we wanted to spend our days.  But when we got there we kind of realized the one thing we really wanted to do was lie out on the sand, stare at the water, drink beer, and read.  Okay, mainly it was me and my mom who did the reading, but everyone else still had a fabulous time watching us.  I had recently been going through a reading slump.  I could only read for a few minutes at a time, couldn’t get into the subject matter, and just was overall restless with the act of reading itself.  This is highly unusual for me, so I was hoping it was just a phase which, thankfully, it was.

At the ocean I immersed myself in a truly remarkable, fascinating, all-around marvelous story by Laura Hillenbrand.  The title of the book is “Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption.”  If you keep up at all with the New York Times Bestseller lists you have more than likely run across this title a time or two.  The book follows the life of Louis Zamperini, a record-setting Olympic runner who joins the Army during World War II.  During a mission, Louie’s plane is shot down and he and two other soldiers are lost at sea for an astounding 30-something days before they are captured by the Japanese and sent to a POW camp.  This however is only the beginning of Louie’s trials.  He is a prisoner for the entirety of the war, moving around from camp to camp, forced into slave labor, and beaten severely almost every day.  It’s an understatement to say that the man went through hell and back, and the fact that he survived it all and eventually made his way home truly does boggle the mind. 

I won’t get into the nitty gritty details of the book too much for really there is far too much to cover.  In its entirety the story of this man’s life, of his will to survive, is something I have never come across before in my history as a reader.  Reading about Louie, about the situations he faces and the awful things he has to go through, feels like reading about a fictional character.  It is extremely hard to wrap your mind around the abject cruelty and menace that was directed toward these American POWs.  I could feel myself shaking my head as I read and exclaiming out loud during particularly incredulous passages.  However, due to the superb writing and research done for this book I also felt instantly connected to Louie as a person, as the main character of this story.  I could feel his determination radiating from the pages, his hurt and anger manifesting through the seemingly never-ending days of being a prisoner.  I found myself silently cheering him on as I got deeper into the story, and cried like a small child when he finally made it home and got to hug his mother again.  Let’s face it; stories like this are inevitable going to be an emotional roller coaster and I did my best to prepare for that going into the first chapter.  But I did not expect to be so amazed, so in awe, of this one human being and the different courses his life took.  The writing is superb and even if you aren’t a WWII buff you will have no trouble following the events and keeping track of what is going on. 

This book was exactly what I needed to break me out of my slump and it is hands down the best book I have read this year.  I was so sad to reach the last page and have my brief glimpse into this man’s life come to an end.  I sound a bit like a stalker, don’t I?  Well, I challenge everyone out there to read this book and come away feeling any different.  I completely and totally recommend this book to, well, everyone!  Please read it, tell me what you think, and we can gush about it together.  Go, fellow bookworms, go forth and read!