Louie Zamperini. I talked to my grandpa today and asked him if he remembered hearing about him - a 1936 Olympic runner who was not able to go to the Olympics - in Tokyo - because he found himself fighting the Japanese in WWII. One unfortunate day while searching for a lost plane, the B-24 Louie was in went down in the ocean itself, killing all but three men. One of the three eventually died, but Louie and his friend Phil drifted for 47 days. After weathering little food (except shark livers and albatross - raw) and almost no water, they finally spotted an island. And what did they find on the island? Japanese men, waiting to take them to a POW camp where the real trials would begin. There, Louie met one of the most sadistic men in the Japanese military, who was determined to break Louie. Of course it didn't happen, or the book would not be called Unbroken. (My grandpa, one year older than Louie, couldn't recall hearing about him, but perhaps that's because he was stationed in the Aleutian Islands and upon the war's end went home to meet and marry my grandma and adopt my then four year old dad. Things got busy for him.)
Read this book. While I would not call it life changing, it is as close as you might get to that on a printed page. Cruelty meets forgiveness, desperation meets hope, starvation meets gorging, nightmares turn to peaceful dreams upon an encounter with Billy Graham, it's all there. I have read so much about WWII over the years, but most of my focus, whether fiction or non-fiction, has been on Nazis and Germany. Ironically, my dad's biological father was killed on a Japanese ship after being taken as a POW, so this book resonated on a personal level as well.
What I wouldn't give for a fraction of Louie's resilience and spirit.
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