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Set in the twentieth century, Unbroken by Laura Hillenbrand tells the story of Louis “Louie” Zamperini, a former Olympic runner who became a pilot at the start of WWII. After a calamitous plane crash over the Pacific Ocean, he drifted for more than forty days before being captured by the Japanese as a prisoner-of-war. Throughout this perilous odyssey, he would encounter many dangerous opponents–sharks, enemy planes, starvation, and sadistic guards–and adapt the courage, cunning, and fortitude to keep going. From start to finish, we follow his life’s journey from troublemaker to athlete, pilot to castaway, and prisoner to survivor. It’s both a vivid description of the horrors of war and an inspirational story about how one man overcame seemingly insurmountable obstacles.

This page describes my first central idea: perseverance/a desire to win help people keep going. Throughout Louie’s life, he had always had a defiance for authority, and when he was captured as a POW, this defiance and refusal to lose makes him defy the Bird–a notoriously cruel and sadistic guard–‘s orders. The page is split into three sections, two “smaller” ideas and one independent thought. To follow my thought process, follow the arrows and the color-coded sections.

This page describes the setting of the text, specifically the ocean that Louie drifts on for 47 days. During this time, he was tempest-tossed and attacked by sharks, but when he drifts into the doldrums–an area of the ocean near the equator with constant windless weather–he sees the calm side of the ocean, which is full of beauty. One of the two ideas–in chaos and danger, there is also peace and beauty–eventually developed into the second central idea below.

This page describes my second central idea: chaos and danger cannot exist without positivity and beauty. Despite the terrible circumstances that Louie goes through, he also finds unexpected kindness from others, such as when a guard named Kawamura offered him candy and “gentle smiles and goodwill” at Kwajalen, the island where he is first captured.

This page is a character page, specifically a power map that records how much power that Louie has over the course of the book. This technique was last used in the realistic fiction unit, and I thought it was useful for this book because it was similar to a fiction book in how it recounted Louie’s adventures.