#18

 #18 ~ My Mother recommended I read Unbroken by Laura Hillenbrand.  I usually don't enjoy non-fiction so much, but it was not long before I couldn't put this one down.  A true story (hence the non-fiction label), about a WWII Pacific POW.  For me and my woefully sorry knowledge of history, WWII was all about Hitler and the Jews, and, oh yea, the Japanese.  I didn't realize how brutal Japan was and how they were the same evil that Germany was.
The book starts out in 1929 with the Zeppelin airship creating a small-world, humanizing, and haunting picture of the world before all hell broke loose.  From page 4: "The journey had begun on August 7, when the Zeppelin had slipped its tethers in Lakehurst, New Jersey, lifted up with a long, slow sigh, and headed for Manhattan.  On Fifth Avenue that summer, demolition was soon to begin on the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel, clearing the way for a skyscraper of unprecedented proportions, the Empire State Building.  At Yankee Stadium, in the Bronx, players were debuting numbered uniforms: Lour Gehrig wore No 4; Babe Ruth, about to hit his five hundredth home run, wore No. 3.  On Wall Street, stock prices were racing toward an all-time high.
    After a slow glide around the Statue of Liberty, the Zeppelin banked north, then turned out over the Atlantic.  In time, land came below again: France, Switzerland, Germany.  The ship passed over Nuremberg, where fringe politician Adolf Hitler, whose Nazi Party had been trounced in the 1928 elections, had just delivered a speech touting selective infanticide.  Then it flew east of Frankfort, where a Jewish woman named Edith Frank was caring for her newborn, a girl named Anne."  The Zeppelin continues around the world and then flies over the house of our main character, Louie Zamperini, a soon-to-be Olympic track star and shortly after, a POW who endures almost more than he can bear.  It's an inspirational and real story about the human character.  It brings tragedy and hope.  From page 376: "Resting in the shade and the stillness, Louie felt profound peace.  When he thought of his history, what resonated with him now was not all that he had suffered but the divine love that he believed had intervened to save him.  He was not the worthless, broken, forsaken man that the Bird had striven to make of him.  In a single, silent moment, his rage, his fear, his humiliation and helplessness, had fallen away.  That morning, he believed, he was a new creation."
A story that speaks to everyone, regardless of the size of the problems we face. 
fl: All he could see, in every direction, was water. ll: There was no trace of them here among the voices, the falling snow, and the old and joyful man, running.