Laura Hillenbrand’s Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption follows the story of Louie Zamperini, a rebellious child who grew up to become one of the fastest runners of the 1930s. He competed as an Olympic track runner in the 1936 Berlin Olympics. The future was looking bright for Zamperini before World War II began, which resulted in the Olympics being cancelled and Louie being drafted into the Army Air Forces as a bombardier. Midway through 1943, his B-24 crash landed in the Pacific Ocean. For weeks, Louie and two other men drifted westward across a seemingly endless ocean, accompanied by a pack of sharks and surviving on scraps of bird and fish meat and the occasional rainfall. Eventually, he arrived in Japanese…
“A lifetime of glory is worth a moment of pain.” (Hillenbrand p.34) Louie Zamperini was a young and rising track star. He was dreaming about the Olympics,but that didn’t go as planned. It is 1943 in May Louie Zamperini’s plane had crashed in the pacific ocean during WW||. Ahead was thousands of miles of ocean with attacking sharks,thirst,and starvation/. He was caught by someone not very pleasant. But do it go away? Find out by reading unbroken By:Laura Hillenbrand. Unbroken has 298 fascinating pages that is a biography written in third [erso. Unbroken is about Louie’s interesting and sacrificing life.…
The longest serving first lady of the United states Eleanor Roosevelt had once said, “People grow through experience if they meet life honestly and courageously. This is how character is built.” In Laura Hillenbrand’s nonfiction book Unbroken, the exceedingly clever Louis Zamperini embodied Roosevelt’s words when he survived World War II employing his own idea’s of his to stay alive and help his remaining crew return home.…
The novel Unbroken, by Laura Hillenbrand, is about the challenging life of Louie Zamperini. Louie is a boy who grew up only knowing how to be in trouble, as in stealing and fighting daily. With the help of his older brother, Pete, Louie tries to clean up his act and gets involved with the school track team. Louie grows up to become an Olympic runner, but his dreams at the gold metal fall short when he is drafted to serve the country. Louie then becomes a bombardier in the Air Corps. The author, Hillenbrand, wrote the novel with great detail to educate about what was happening in the novel and to keep one attached while reading.…
“All were merged into one smoothly working machine; they were, in fact, a poem of motion, a symphony of swinging blades”, this quote stated by Daniel James Brown, author of The Boys in the Boat: Nine Americans and Their Epic Quest for Gold at the 1936 Berlin Olympics. This inspiring biography is about the enthralling story behind US gold medal winner Joe Rantz. The book describes in detail the tremendous amount of work he and his fellow teammates at Washington University accomplished to take bring home the much coveted gold medal, at a time of great political strife throughout the world. In this enthralling book, Daniel Brown writes about the harsh life of Joe Rantz, where he faced abandonment by his family. The book is set during the Great Depression and during Hitler’s genocide of Non-Aryans. Through the use of pathos that is evidence of emotional…
The texts Monster written and performed by 4 members of the DC slam team, Dance with the Devil composed by Immortal Technique, Blindside directed by John Lee Hancock, and Divergent directed by Neil Burger, studied the connecting idea of influences across life in varying ways. An important lesson that was found was that our cultural capital can influence our choices and the way we see and value things in life. Secondly, it is our choice on whether we let our past and cultural capital be the barrier that stops us from seeing things from a new and broader perspective.…
"The Devil in The White City" is a book written about the 1893 Chicago's World Fair but simultaneously tells the true story of Americas first serial killer, H.H. Holmes.…
Gail Devers a retired Olympic track star and a Hall of Fame inductee once said, “Sometimes we fall, sometimes we stumble, but we can’t stay down. We can’t allow life to beat us down. Everything happens for a reason, and it builds character in us, and it tells us what we are about and how strong we really are when we didn’t think we could be that strong.” In Laura Hillenbrand’s nonfiction book Unbroken, the ambitious Louis Zamperini brought Devers words to life over the course of his track career and his perilous time as a POW. In short, because of Louis Zamperini undying need to succeed no matter the challenge that he faced, Hillenbrand gave audiences this unforgettable story of survival.…
Fred Korematsu was born in Oakland, California on January 30, 1919. His parents had immigrated to the United States from Japan in 1905. Despite the fact that he was an American citizen, Korematsu, being a Japanese-American, faced overwhelming racial prejudice while he was growing up. He was often bullied at school and discriminated against. Even the family of his Italian American girlfriend, Ida Boitano, felt that the Japanese were inferior to whites. In the years approaching World War II the hatred grew more intense. He was rejected by school clubs and activities. When the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor and the United States officially entered the war many Americans were chomping at the bit too enlist in the military. Due to stomach ulcers, Korematsu was unable to join the armed forces. Instead, he trained to become a welder in an attempt to contribute his services to the defense effort. Despite this obvious display of patriotism he did not receive much admiration in the work field. He received a job at the docks in Oakland as a shipyard welder and quickly rose through the ranks to foreman. One day, when he arrived to punch in his time card, Korematsu found a notice on his desk. The notice informed him that he was being fired from his job due to his Japanese ancestry.…
“Then he found himself thinking of something Pete once said: A lifetime of glory is worth a moment of pain” (36). Louie Zamperini joined the Air Force during WWII and was assigned to search for survivors from a plane crash, but ended up crashing in the middle of the Pacific himself. Starving and deterred, Louie floated for a total of forty seven days and finally rafted into a Japanese boat where he was swept away into Japanese camps, some POW camps, some not. After a few years of being in the camps, the Americans won the war and Louie was sent back to America. In the book Unbroken, written by Laura Hillenbrand, Louie Zamperini is best defined as a resilient and defiant person.…
Hillenbrand, Laura. Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption. New York: Random House, 2010.…
Louis Zamperini is a World War Two veteran and the main character of Laura Hillenbrand’s bestselling novel, Unbroken. Louis was born on January 26, 1917. As a child, he was constantly on the go and causing trouble. It did not matter how many times he was caught, he always went back to wreaking havoc on the streets of Torrance,…
In Washington Irving’s “The Devil and Tom Walker”, the imagery creates a dark and disturbing mood which shows the theme of how greed will make some people do whatever it takes to get what they desire. The language or words used to describe things such as settings, a character, or an event can help create a mood to help describe the theme.…
One of the saddest aspects of the Holocaust was not how many lives were lost, but how many souls were lost. Those lucky enough to survive Auschwitz, Buchenwald, and the like came out changed men and women, and not for the better. While some, such as Elie Wiesel, were able to contribute to the world and keep alive the memory of the victims of the Holocaust, many left the experience shells; shadows of their former selves. So much had changed during their time in the concentration camps and they had lost so much of their dignity and identity.…
The history of war is what many spend time reading about in textbooks. Few, however, experience war and all that it encompasses. David Leckie, a marine during World War II, uses his book, Helmet for My Pillow, to share with readers the truth of what it was like to be a soldier. Rather than skimming the surface of his time on Parris Island and the Pacific Islands, he goes into unmatched, excruciating detail; every trench dug, every shot fired, and every fallen soldier passed was recounted by Leckie. Setting this story apart from any other, the first-hand accounts of combat, unlikely descriptions of the day-to-day actions of the soldiers, and the heart that Leckie intertwines with each part of his story all combine to make this thought-provoking,…