‘Unbroken’ by Laura Hillenbrand, describes Louis (Louie) Zamperini’s journey from a once famous American Olympian to a WWII airman to missing in the Pacific Ocean and finally a POW(prisoner of war) in Japan. This story shows the struggle and conflict that Louie had to face with remarkable details and descriptions. ‘Unbroken’ takes readers with Louie through a true, powerful story about survival, resilience, and redemption.

Keep scrolling through my blog to see some of the themes and central ideas I gradually discovered and developed in this incredible non-fiction masterpiece.

The first central idea I wrote was ” In the 1920s, there was prejudice against Italian immigrants“, but soon I realized that this central idea did not appear throughout the book, so I developed some new main central ideas over the next few lessons. I returned and added quotes and evidence later in the book to show the huge range of ideas. My favorite theme/ central idea of these in my notebook is “Never give up, and always look for new opportunities“. This theme is very fitting for the book as it comes up multiple times in the story, from pages 20 to 269.

In lesson 7, I learned about making connections between different parts of my book and connecting them with different topics. For example, torture in the camps would lead to humiliation which leads to the topic of dignity which is a topic widely talked about and expressed in the book. On this same page, I also wrote a timeline of all the different places( mainly POW camps) Louie stayed at after his 47-day drift across the Pacific Ocean. In these camps, you could see the contrast between characters like the kind Kawamura in Kwajalein Island to the evil ‘Bird’ Watanabe who tortured prisoners for fun.

In lesson 8, we talked about descriptive passages, and through a descriptive extract from Unbroken on page 201, I developed the central idea: “POWs in WWII were living in extreme conditions, but were all fighting to survive”. This passage could really make readers empathize with the POWs and understand what Louie and the others had to go through during the war.

Throughout this unit, I found many themes and central ideas and put all of them on one tracking page to put together the development and discoveries of these themes. I am most intrigued by the central idea: “POW camps in Japan in WWII tortured prisoner and treated them in inhuman ways, destroying their life and dignity”.  This central idea runs all the way through the second half of the book and it hurts me that it is true, there is a very significant amount of evidence that supports this, all speaking of the destruction of life and dignity.

I love this book for its beautiful and descriptive writing, I believe this book can teach everyone very important lessons and teach us some of the truth of what happened in WWII so we can understand and empathize. I  would recommend this book to anyone who would like to read a nice book and is interested in WWII.

In conclusion, thank you so much for reading to the end of my blog and I hope you can live like Louie being determined and never giving up.