Unbroken by Laura Hillenbrand is a true story about Louie Zamperini’s unique voyage through WWII. He went from troublesome child, to Olympic runner, to Air Force officer, to a prisoner of war, and everything in between. He lived through so much and shows just how much veterans went through to keep America safe.

World War II was especially hard for Air Force officers, which can be shown on page 50, where it says “For days, the captives were held on the airfield…as the Japanese made plans to execute them.” The Japanese officers were incredibly cruel towards POWs, but they were especially harsh towards officers because they were jealous of their stature.

Teamwork is crucial to survival, and Louie portrays this many times in the book. During his time stranded on the ocean, it says “All three were indispensable. Had there been only two, they couldn’t have pumped, patched an hit sharks” (pg. 122). The feat of staying alive while doing all these things would have been all too impossible for Louie if he was alone. He desperately needed his crew-mates to stay alive in this time of need.

Design by Naomi Fisher [STUDENT]

At this point I was about half-way through the book and my focus on this page was mostly focused on WWII and the effects it had on Louie. This page was focused on helping our class improve our skills on finding central ideas and backing them up.

Design by Naomi Fisher [STUDENT]

My themes page was very similar to my central idea page in that it was formatted the same and did the same thing as the previous page except for themes. This page was more diverse and my reasoning included more thought.

Design by Naomi Fisher [STUDENT]

This page is focused on improving my skill in identifying narrative sections in my book as opposed to informative sections (as seen in the next image) and I spent a lot of focus on the beginning of the book more than the end of the book. I think this section is very helpful to create but not as helpful to read in order to understand it.

Design by Naomi Fisher [STUDENT]

This section is an extension of the previous page and is designed to help me better understand the informative pieces of the book. I tried to use the whole book in this page and gained a much deeper understanding of informative write in literary nonfiction.

Design by Naomi Fisher [STUDENT]

The cause and effects page was based around the stem that the POW’s started to steal from the Japanese. The page was to help us open our mind to the fact that multiple things help cause and stem from a single event. I realized that there are way more things that can happen because of one single event than I thought.