"He was a serial runaway he was a brawler he was a prankster." "He was the Artful Dodger of his hometown from a very early age," Hillenbrand says. That verve would one day make him an Olympic athlete at the time, it simply made him spirited to the point of delinquency. Hillenbrand tells NPR's Scott Simon that when Zamperini was a kid in Torrance, Calif., he was known for his unbridled energy. When a plane he is piloting disappears into the Pacific Ocean, years of starvation, imprisonment and brutality follow. Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience and Redemption follows Zamperini as a bombardier during World War II. Now she offers up the saga of Louis Zamperini, a former Olympic runner who became an American airman - and whose true laurels were the result of trials, endurance and will far from any stadium. The first was Seabiscuit, the tale of the Depression-era racehorse. Laura Hillenbrand has written two great big books about exceptional athletes and inspiring survivors that the world somehow managed to forget for a while. Later that year, a crash involving a B-24 bomber similar to this one would land the former Olympian in a Japanese prison camp. Louis Zamperini peers over the hatch nose of his aircraft in 1943.
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