I wasn’t planning on reading this book.  I seem to be establishing a pattern of reading  authors’ books published after the authors have had their bestsellers.  Water for Elephants by Sarah Gruen was enormously popular for a long time, and I have on the authority of someone whose opinion I respect, that it is a wonderful book.  So I picked up the next novel by her, Ape House, and although it was absorbing and entertaining, it did not live up to my expectations.  Likewise, I did not read Seabiscuit for all those months it was on the bestseller list.  However, I saw so many favorable reviews of her next book, Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience and Redemption. that I loaded it on my Ipad and  planned to skim it just to see what it was like.  I was soon captured by the story, and found it hard to put down. The book tells the story of Louis Zamperini, starting with his rather wild childhood, and chronicles his development as an Olympic runner, his time in the Army Air Corps, and the years he spent in a concentration camp.  Zamperini faced incredible hardship--starvation, disease, medical experimentation, and unbelievable cruelty from his captors.  Before Hillenbrand interviewed him, Louie had told his story many times at speaking engagements and in interviews with various publications.  moreover, Hillenbrand conducted over seventy interviews with him, primarily by phone.  This frequent retelling may be responsible for creating the distance the reader experiences.  Readers know what happened to Louis Zamperini, but they never actually understand the man --a man whose story is reflective of a generation whose lives were impacted by a Depression, a World War and the political machinations that followed.  It would be interesting to see beneath the surface to understand what motivated this young almost-delinquint to survive by ingenuity and determination, and ultimately to redeem his life by strength of will.  Hillenbrand has a readable style which moves the story along, in spite of the long digressions and the passages which fall back on rambling generalities.  She has apparently done a mammoth amount of research, which is documented in the back of the book.  I found much of this almost as interesting to read as the novel, as it does reflect the diligence of the author in trying to ferret out the story of Louie and the story of what all of the Japanese POWs endured.  .