Summary of Laura Hillenbrand's Unbroken

Everest Media

Description

Please note: This is a companion version & not the original book.
Sample Book Insights:
#1 In 1929, a boy in California watched as the German dirigible Graf Zeppelin flew over his house, putting out the stars. The airship was three days from completing a spectacular feat of aeronautics: circumnavigation of the globe.
#2 Louis Silvie Zamperini was a boy who was born in 1917. He had an uncommonly clever mind, and he was untamable. When he grew up, he began a one-boy insurgency.
#3 Louie was a thief in Torrance, California. He would steal food from houses, and would sometimes even break into people’s houses to steal their food. He was often chased by people he had robbed, and at least two people threatened to shoot him.
#4 Louie was a different kind of kid than Pete. He was small, and in his first years in Torrance, his lungs were still damaged from the pneumonia he had contracted when he was young. His features were growing at different rates, and his ears leaned sidelong off his head like holstered pistols.

Sujets

• Seconde Guerre mondiale
• History
• World War II
• Military
• Segunda Guerra Mundial
• Histoire

Informations

• Publié par: Everest Media LLC
• Date de parution: 20 mars 2022
• Nombre de lectures: 1
• EAN13: 9781669354963
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

Insights on Laura Hillenbrand's Unbroken
Contents Insights from Chapter 1
Insights from Chapter 1

#1

In 1929, a boy in California watched as the German dirigible Graf Zeppelin flew over his house, putting out the stars. The airship was three days from completing a spectacular feat of aeronautics: circumnavigation of the globe.

#2

Louis Silvie Zamperini was a boy who was born in 1917. He had an uncommonly clever mind, and he was untamable. When he grew up, he began a one-boy insurgency.

#3

Louie was a thief in Torrance, California. He would steal food from houses, and would sometimes even break into people’s houses to steal their food. He was often chased by people he had robbed, and at least two people threatened to shoot him.

#4

Louie was a different kind of kid than Pete. He was small, and in his first years in Torrance, his lungs were still damaged from the pneumonia he had contracted when he was young. His features were growing at different rates, and his ears leaned sidelong off his head like holstered pistols.

#5

Louie’s father, Anthony, was always trying to help him, but Louie’s behavior was often too much for him to handle. His mother, Louise, had a different approach: she knew how to handle Louie’s mischievousness.

#6

Despite all her efforts,Louie remained defiant. He ran away and wandered around San Diego for days, sleeping under a highway overpass. He tried to ride a steer in a pasture, got tossed onto the ragged edge of a fallen tree, and limped home with his gashed knee bound in a handkerchief.

#7

When Louie started Torrance High School, he was not the same boy he had been when he moved to California. He had become a dangerous young man, and his education was coming to an end. He had no skills, and he was unlikely to get a job.

#8

During this time, Louis slept with his brother. He would lie awake in bed, listening to the trains pass by. He would imagine himself on a train, growing smaller and more distant until he disappeared.

#9

The rehabilitation of Louie began in 1931, when he was 14 years old. He had never won any attention or praise, so he sought it through punishment. He was made eligible for athletics for 1932.

#10

Louie’s parents wanted him to go to college, but he wanted to travel instead. So they got into a fight, and he left. He eventually made his way to Los Angeles, where he slept in a car with a friend and broke into a house to take a shower.

#11

In the 1930s, track was hugely popular, and its elite performers were household names. Among them was a Kansas University miler named Glenn Cunningham. He had his hero.

#12

In 1933, Louie began tenth grade at Compton. He was suddenly popular with the fashionable crowd, and girls found him dreamy. He was also unbeaten in track that season.

#13

Louie was a track star in Southern California, and he was known for his supreme high school moment in 1934, when he broke the national high school record for the mile. His rival so exhausted himself chasing Louie that he had to be carried from the track.

#14

By the time he graduated from high school, Louie was already the fastest high school miler in American history. He wanted to run in the 1936 Olympics in Berlin, but he knew he wasn’t fast enough to make the team.

#15

In May, Louie was reading an article about the Compton Open, a prestigious track meet to be held at the Los Angeles Coliseum on May 22. The headliner in the 5,000 meters was Norman Bright, a twenty-six-year-old schoolteacher. Louie was invited to the final of the Olympic trials in June.

#16

On the night of July 3, 1936, the residents of Torrance gathered to see Louie off to New York. They presented him with a wallet bulging with traveling money, a train ticket, new clothes, a shaving kit, and a suitcase emblazoned with the words TORRANCE TORNADO.

#17

The start of the race had passed, but the NBC radio announcer was still lingering on the swimming trials. The announcer listed the positions of the 5,000-meter runners, but didn’t mention Louie. Lash and Bright led the field. Louie hovered in the middle of the pack, waiting to make his move.

#18

After the race, Louie received 125 telegrams. The judges ruled that it was Lash, not Zamperini, who had won. Deckard had hung on for third. The announcer soon corrected himself, but it hardly dimmed the celebration in Torrance. The hometown boy had made the Olympic team.

#19

The 1936 Olympic team was on the luxury liner Manhattan, which was barely past the Statue of Liberty before Louie began stealing things. Everyone was fighting for training space, and the only way to do that was to circle the first-class deck, weaving among deck chairs and other athletes.

#20

When the athletes landed in Hamburg, they were all expanding. One doctor noted that quite a few were expanding. Louie had gained ten pounds.

#21

On August 1, the athletes were driven to Berlin for the opening ceremonies. The German spectators were impressed by the strength of the Luftwaffe, and the athletes were treated to a thunderous show that culminated in the release of twenty thousand doves. As the doves flew around in confusion, cannons began firing, and the doves began relieving themselves over the athletes.

#22

Louie had progressed enough in four 5,000-meter races to compete with Lash, but he knew that he had no chance of winning an Olympic medal. His day would come in the 1,500 four years later.

#23

On August 7, Louie lay face down in the Olympic stadium’s infield, ready for the 5,000-meter final. He was terrified. He forced himself to relax and wait. When the time came, he rose and walked to the starting line.

#24

Louie ran his final lap in 56 seconds. It was a monumental feat, as it was rare for a man to run a last lap in one minute in the 1930s.

#25

When he returned home, Louie told everyone about his encounter with Hitler. He said the führer had called him the boy with the fast finish.

#26

Louie had hoped to meet Glenn Cunningham, but his hero was too mature for him. Instead, he found a suitably irresponsible companion, donned his Olympic dress uniform, and went exploring Berlin. They stole anything Germanish that they could get their hands on.

#27

After the Olympics, the Olympic Village was turned into military barracks. With the Games over and his usefulness for propaganda expended, the designer Captain Fürstner learned that he was to be cashiered from the Wehrmacht because he was a Jew. He killed himself.

#28

The brothers knew that Louie could win gold in 1940, and they both shaped their dreams around Tokyo, Japan, which was chosen to host the 1940 Games. Louie wanted to go to the Olympics in Tokyo, but he knew that he would have to train hard to do so.

#29

At the University of Southern California, Louie met a Japanese émigré named Kunichi James Sasaki. They became friends, and Louie was impressed with Sasaki’s scholarliness.

#30

Jimmie Sasaki, who was friends with Louie, was not what he seemed. He had never attended Harvard, Yale, or Princeton, but he seemed to be a student at USC. He was actually a political science graduate from USC ten years earlier.

#31

In the spring of 1938, track experts were beginning to toss around the idea of a four-minute mile. Most observers, including Glenn Cunningham, had long believed that it couldn’t be done. In June 1938, Louie arrived at the NCAA Championships in Minneapolis, gunning for four minutes. But he was boxed in half way through the race, and the other runners began kicking him.

#32

In 1939, Louie won every race he competed in. He was so good that he took two seconds and two close fourths, twice beating Cunningham, in a series of eastern indoor miles against the best runners in America.

#33

In the late 1930s, Japan had crafted a muscular, technologically sophisticated army and navy, and through a military-run school system, it had shaped its people for war. In the late 1930s, both Germany and Japan were ready to move.

#34

In September 1940, America began to slide toward war as Hitler drove the British and their allies into the sea at Dunkirk. In the Pacific, Japan was tearing through China and moving into Indochina.

#35

When he finished basic training, he had an unhappy surprise. Because he hadn’t read his air corps washout papers, he didn't know that he'd agreed to rejoin the corps for future service. In November 1941, he arrived at Ellington Field in Houston.

#36

In September of 1942, a letter was sent to the FBI from a brigadier general at the War Department, Military Intelligence Division, saying that a credible informant had warned military officials that a California man, believed to be working for an innocuous local Japanese organization, had in fact been an employee of the Japanese navy, on assignment to raise money for Japan’s war effort.

#37

On Sunday, Dec. 7, 1941, a pilot named Mitsuo Fuchida led a group of Japanese planes over Oahu Island. Below him, the dark sea gave way to a strand of white: waves slapping the northern tip of Oahu.

#38

On December 7, 1941, the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, and America was at war. Louie was a serviceman and was sent back to his base immediately.

#39

Indoor tracks are shorter than outdoor ones, which forces runners to make more turns to cover the same distance. Because of this, indoor records are generally slower.

#40

On December 7, Japan attacked the United States with massive air raids on Hawaii and other locations. Four air-raid alerts occurred in San Francisco that night.

#41

The Battle of Wake Island was the first American victory in the war. It took the Japanese three days to capture the island, and they sent the Americans to Japan and occupied China as their first prisoners of war.

#42

Louie was trained in the use of two bombsights. For dive-bombing, he had a $1 handheld sight