《Unbroken: An Olympian’s Journey from Airmen to Castaway to Captive》by Laura Hillenbrand is a book illustrating the life of a famous Olympic runner-Louis Zamperini. From a naughty little boy, stealing items from neighbours to becoming a captive of WW2, the book illustrates the difficult life and growth of Louie. From small, Louie wasn’t a good school kid, always fighting and bullying classmates. It was running which found his way into society. Together with his brother Pete, Louie used his talent and hard work to improve day by day, making it to the Berlin Olympics in 1936. However, when WW2 erupted and Japan attacked Pearl Harbor, Louie’s life took a change, which he had never expected… Scan through my notebook pages to understand more:
Firstly, after barely getting into the book, I had found my first central idea: Aviation was extremely unreliable during WW2. I came to this central idea after making a mind map.
Next up, during humanities class, we learnt about the narrative and informative elements which can exist in our books. However, after looking through my notebook page on informative elements, I realized that all of the key elements inside were closely connected together, forming a central idea- War was extremely brutal for soldiers participating in it:
After that, we needed to prepare a town hall argument during humanities class on the topic of a controversial theme which had occurred in our book. After thinking together with my book club, we together came up with the theme- Everyone should have the right to be forgiven, no matter their previous actions.
Diving deeper into the unit and into the book, we moved into some causes and effects in our book. From this, I surprisingly was able to link it to the central idea that War was extremely brutal for soldiers participating in it, adding upon it by the realization of another aspect-mental abuse:
Lastly, after finishing reading my book, I started writing a synthesis page explaining aviation’s development throughout the storyline. From this, however, after thinking about the first central idea-Aviation was extremely unreliable during WW2- I was able to add upon in, by changing it to Aviation made large progress over the years of WW2.
This was my notebook page from this Humanities unit. The book “Unbroken” surprised me, giving me a new insight on WW2, which I had never seen before. All these notebook pages posted in this blog post were based on my reactions and new insights about this novel.
Thank you for reading!
