Unbroken

Unbroken

Author: Laura Hillenbrand 2010 406pp

My rating 3.5*

Started December 8 2010, Finished December 12

This story of Louie Zamperini, a world class distance runner who became an Army Air Force officer at the beginning of WWII, was shot down in the middle of the Pacific, floated for months on a raft with no provisions or shelter and then spent years being hideously abused in Japanese POW camps is a testament to human psychological and physical resilience. Hillenbrand does an excellent job of researching this story, bringing to light facts even Zamperini was not aware of, but to me the book, perhaps because of the memory blurring effects of the decades between the events and Hillenbrand's research, did not provide enough insight into the mechanisms Zamperini used to endure his sufferings. Unbroken is a great story, but lacked psychological depth.

At five he started smoking (5)

… Pete was the only kid in Torrance who could get away with such a remark (14. How was this assertion fact checked?)

Japan galloped all over the globe. (52 More sloppy writing/editing. It would be more accurate to write “Pacific” instead of “globe”.

… between 1943 and 1945, four hundred AAF crews were lost en route to their theatres. (79)

In 1943 in the Pacific Ocean Areas Theater … for every plane lost in combat, six were lost in accidents (80 I suspect “lost” is too strong a word and that damaged would be more accurate.)

PP 173-4 Gorging after weeks of starvation without extreme stomach pain and associated illness?

The Japanese sealed their camps from outside information and went to some lengths to convince their captives of Allied annihilation … by inventing stories of Allied losses and ridiculously implausible Japanese feats. Once, they announced that their military had shot Abraham Lincoln and torpedoed Washington D.C. (205)

The Reader

The Reader

Author: Bernhard Schlink 1995 218 pp

My rating 3.5*

Started January 9 2011, Finished January 10

For such a minor work, One Day has become somewhat central to my current from of reference for appreciating other books. One Day comes to mind when assessing The Reader as they both concisely yet movingly convey the emotional arc of an entire life. This novel(ette), the movie version of which won Kate Winslet an Oscar, is set in Germany and narrated by its protagonist, Michael Berg. In the unremarkable first half of the book, set in the late 1950s, Michael is a teenager who has a consuming affair with a woman, Hannah, in her mid thirties who one day without notice disappears from Micheal’s town and life. In the far more provocative second half of the book, Micheal chances upon a trial for war crimes committed as part of the Holocaust in which Hannah is the central defendant. This section is something of an exploration of the motives of “Hitler's willing executioners” and raises the surprisingly hard to answer question “what would you have done?” had you been a German citizen of age during WWII. The book also raises the interesting idea that our small personal shames can become so consuming that maintaining their secrecy can become more important than self preservation.

She was struggling, as she always had struggled, not to show what she could do but to hide what she couldn't do. A life made up of advances that were actually frantic retreats and victories that were concealed defeats. (134)

There is no need to talk, because the truth of what one says lies in what one does. (174)

Colonel Roosevelt

Colonel Roosevelt

Author: Edmund Morris 2010 570 pp

My rating 4*

Started December 15 2010, Finished Jan 4 2011

This worthy conclusion to Moriss's highly-recommended life of Roosevelt trilogy gets a slightly lower rating from me that its predecessors not due to any shortcoming on the author's part, but because I found the period of TR's life after he left the presidency to be less interesting than that covered in Morris's first two volumes. Roosevelt was a man of action par excellence and I found him less compelling as a spectator in the stands rather than as the key player in the center of the action; in fact in the section near the end of the book about World War I, the actions and words of a sickly TR observing from afar are much less interesting than those of his children who are in Europe actively involved in the carnage – up to that point in his story, TR always commanded the spotlight by force of personality, intellect and action. While it is sad to read of Roosevelt's physical decline from unstoppable dynamo to his early death as a broken down wreck – the rough use he had continually put himself through seemed to have caught up with him – one still comes away from the book and the series as a whole for an overwhelming respect for this man who has to be considered a short list candidate as the most capable and accomplished American in history.

A tip of the hat also to the author for the thoroughness of his research, the sprightliness of his prose and the even handed appraisal he provides of his subject despite his obvious great admiration for him.

“Villa,” Roosevelt said, “is a murderer and a rapist.”

[John] Reed tried to provoke him. “What's wrong with that? I believe in rape.”

But Roosevelt only grinned. “I'm glad to find a young man who believes in something.” (427)

Ted [Roosevelt Jr] noted with approval that more than half of his 1,400 fellow [army] trainees were Harvard graduates. “I suppose some Yale men would fight if there was a war, but it is more clear than ever that Yale is the great middle class college, wand the middle classes are not naturally gallant.” (433)