Unbroken Author Style Summary

Unbroken – By Laura Hillenbrand If no one stated to me this was non-fiction, I would have read the entire book with the impression that it was highly demonstrative fiction. The author is extremely detailed in her writings, but does so in a way that makes the book read like a novel. It is a very eye opening and fantastic book, and I recommend that everyone should read it. Louie Zamperini, the main character in the book. He is an Italian boy that grew up to be an Olympian in the 1936 Berlin Olympics, running the 5000m. After that, he was enlisted in the air force during World War Two. He flew in b-24 bombers during missions over the pacific. His original plane was shot up, so he was forced to fly a notoriously unreliable plane. The plane crashed. Louie and Phil, the pilot, survived for 48 days on a raft and washed ashore on a Japanese torture island. They were then transferred to multiple POW camps, where Louie was terrified, beaten, and tortured by a guard called “The Bird”. The story ended with a troubling fact: Only one percent of allied POWs died while in captivity in Germany, while that rate was over forty percent in Japan. Less than half a percent of Japanese POWs died while in American captivity. The author has a tendency to include detail that would not be included in more factual non-fiction books. Such quotes include this one: “In his barracks one day, a man dragged in from slave work, looking spent. He lay down, asked to be awakened for dinner, and went still. At chowtime, Louie kicked his foot. The man didn’t move. He was dead. He was young, like everyone else, and hadn’t even looked sick.” This gives you more of an intimate look into the POW camp brutality than straight facts and statistics. Nonfiction books do not usually include information that cannot be proved by more than one source. Quotes like this give you a more intimate look into the lives of war prisoners. It makes you feel the despair of Louie and his POW mates. The book is