Review: Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption

Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption by Laura Hillenbrand

My rating: 5 of 5 stars



This was a great book. Jo recommended it to me, stating that it was "as good as Middlesex" which is high praise indeed.

The story is about a former Olympic athlete named Louis Zamperini who joins the Air Force. When his plane is shot down over the Pacific, he survives on a life raft for a month before being captured by the Japanese.

I really enjoyed reading this - it kept my attention and I looked forward to getting into bed each night to find out what was going to happen next. I learned a lot about how terrible POW camps in Japan were, and I was amazed at how resilient Zamperini and his fellow soldiers were when stranded at sea.

The character development was excellent, as was the research. I also appreciated how Hillenbrand followed the story past Zamperini's return home, and ended the book with an update on how each of the main characters was doing, or the circumstances of their deaths.

Wonder if I would like Seabiscuit as much.



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The Milk Memos by Cate Colburn-Smith and Andrea Serrette

This book was great - it's a semi-autobiographical account of several women who meet while pumping breastmilk at work at IBM.  It mixes information and tips about breastfeeding and pumping with excerpts from a journal they kept together while pumping.  I think some of the characters in the book were real, and others were composites of women the authors got to know.

A quick read, I enjoyed this book while I was feeding the baby.  While there weren't that many new tips in the book for me, I did like feeling like I was part of a larger community of pumping moms.  It was also a good inspiration for the business trip I recently took.

Probably not a book anyone would like unless they are in this situation, but I am so I did!

Liars and Outliers by Bruce Schneier

Disclosure: I received a discounted and autographed copy of this book in exchange for writing this review.

Interestingly, that deal plays very well into the theme of this book - subtitled "enabling the trust that society needs to thrive", Liars and Outliers is about how trust is created, enforced, and betrayed.  Bruce Schneier (who I've been a fan of for a long time, scroll down in this post for a short review of his previous book, Beyond Fear) is a security expert, initially cyber-security, although his blog and books have now broadened to be about security in general.  He's written a lot about changes in security since 9/11, highlighting how many measures are "security theater" designed to make us feel more secure rather than actually increasing security.

So offering a free book in exchange for a review was a big experiment on his part.  And the model his book explains around why we trust people would indicate that some Societal, Moral, Reputational, or Institutional Pressure compelled me to follow through on my commitment to write this. (It was moral.)  In fact, a large section of the book explores each of those types of pressure with examples ranging from Worldcom to child labor.  He provides a model of what the interests and norms are in a society and then the things that challenge and enforce them.  This model is revisited many, many times throughout the text.

The remainder of the book discusses what security systems exist to enforce these norms, and how these models and ideas are implemented in organizations of different sizes, ranging from small groups to large institutions.  Schneier draws on a variety of current examples (Facebook privacy and the TSA) as well as classic game theory (Prisoners' Dilemma). 

There is a lot to like about this book: it provides a model that explains how society functions and why we trust certain people and entities.  In fact, the reason it took me so long to write this review (I received the book months ago) is that I recently had a baby.  As we've hired people to care for our daughter, I was acutely aware of what made me trust different caregivers.  Reputation in some cases, a personal recommendation in others, a recommendations from a group I trusted for another case.  In what I consider to be the most important decision I've made in years (who cares for my child) I naturally relied on many of the pressures Schneier highlights.

What I found hard about reading this book was the sheer number of examples he used in every chapter.  Rather than analyze a few familiar examples in great depth, he chose to pepper each chapter with what felt like dozens of small examples and name-drops.  I would have enjoyed a more in-depth analysis of just a few examples to better understand the systems he was explaining.  In some cases, he returned to the same ideas repeatedly - like Prisoners' Dilemma and the Hawk-Dove game (another game theory model) - and I found that valuable.  But in many chapters he jumps from one example to another each paragraph, which I found a less effective way to make his points.

Overall I'm glad I read this book but I didn't enjoy it as much as I do his daily blog posts.  Perhaps if I were not as close a follower of his, more of the ideas would have been new, and the examples more illustrative.

The New York Regional Mormon Singles Halloween Dance: A Memoir by Elna Baker

Another NPR find - this one someone I heard on The Moth and I think I also heard on This American Life.

Elna is a Mormon from the West Coast who moves to New York City to go to college and ends up living there for several years in her early 20's.  This is a collection of essays about her life in the city as she struggles to figure out how much of her Mormon background she wants to carry forward in her adult life.  Many chapters read like "No Sex and the City."  Others are more about her jobs (among others, at FAO Schwartz and Nobu) or her family relationships.

This was definitely a quick read that kept my attention.  Baker is a funny writer, able to see humor in her own misadventures.  Her ongoing conflict between the secular and the traditional is well-described and it is easy to empathize with her.

Learning to Die in Miami by Carlos Eire

Oops - this memoir is a sequel to a book I read last year but forgot to review at the time!  I had heard Carlos Eire interviewed on NPR and thought his story was interesting.

The first book was called Waiting for Snow in Havana.  In that book, Carlos is growing up in Cuba in the late 1950's and early 1960's.  His privileged and sheltered childhood comes to an abrupt end when he is among 14,000 chilren airlifted out of Cuba and sent to the U.S. upon Castro's ascendance.

This book picks up with Carlos adjusting to life in the U.S.  He is shuffled among family friends, foster homes, and other living arrangements, sometimes with his older brother and sometimes alone.  The title of the books is an allusion to his belief that "Carlos" from Cuba has to die for his American "Charles" or "Chuck" or other identity to emerge.  While the first book told a lot of his childhood, this one talks about him mostly as a pre-teen and teen, and flashes forward many times to his life as an adult.

Unlike other memoirs I've read that have been written in more than one part, these two books were very similar in style, tone, and composition.  I enjoyed Eire's style in fact - it was unusual - the books being written more as a reverie, a collection of memories, than as a straightforward linear narrative.  Eire was very poetic in places, very sad in others.  This was not a laugh-out-loud set of books, but I did learn about an immigrant experience I was unfamiliar with, and was compelled to read the second one.

Pack of Two by Caroline Knapp

Disclaimer: I’ve become an extreme dog person in the past two years, since Lucy came home with us.  This book is only for extreme dog people. 

This book is by Caroline Knapp, author of many of my favorites, including Appetites.  She gets a dog (coincidentally named Lucille) who changes Caroline’s life.  This book was a lovely story about their friendship and how having a dog changed Knapp’s outlook on life.

I definitely related to some of her sentiments around how it feels to be around a dog.  She was a more solitary person than I am, so in some sections she described a relationship with Lucille that was more intense than mine with Lucy.  But overall I appreciated her elevation of dog to complete companion and enjoyed her anecdotes and reflection.

Paris to the Moon by Adam Gopnik

Webster bought this book for me a few years back when we last went to Paris.  Since I didn't read it then, I thought last week's trip to Paris (part work part play) would be a good time.

The memoir is by Adam Gopnik, an occasional writer for The New Yorker, and chronicles his family's move to Paris when his son was a toddler.  He and his wife and son live there for a few years and this book is a collection of essays he wrote during that time.

I enjoyed reading this book but it wasn't what I expected.  I thought it would be a lightweight memoir about his time there.  While there was some of that (anecdotes about finding an apartment, taking his son to the park), the book was much more a set of reflections on society and what it means to be Parisian - including politics, labor relations, medicine, and the pure quintessence of living in Paris.

I’d recommend the book; just don’t expect a lighthearted memoir.

Fermat's Last Theorem by Amir D. Aczel

After reading Longitude, I decided on another book in the same genre: thin history of science books.  This book, subtitled "Unlocking the Secret of an Ancient Mathematical Problem" begins with Andrew Wiles' alleged proof of of Fermat's Last Theorem.  FLT is simple to understand but was, for nearly three centuries, impossible to prove. 

The theorem states that equations like a^2 + b^2 = c^2 can't be solved for exponents larger than 2.  Fermat, mathematician in the 1600's, stated this theorem with an innocent note indicating he had proven it but didn't have space in the margin of his notebook to write out the entire proof.  Since then, mathematicians had struggled to find a proof, and in 1993 Wiles was so sure that he had that he presented it at a large conference. 

Wiles' original proof of FLT was erroneous, so the book picks up the story there, ultimately unraveling the politics and characters involved in the lead-up to the proof as well as the correction that Wiles ultimately presented to successfully prove the theorem.  However, to appreciate the entire story, the author uses most of the book to provide a history of the math behind the story, starting long before Fermat, with the Greek mathematicians up through modern times.

I liked the book but I didn't love it.  I guess as a math person I craved better explanations of some of the mathematical concepts.  I wanted to understand the basic layout of the proof, and instead I got a narrative of the people involved as well as this history, but not enough math.  Some sections (like on non-Euclidean geometry) were at a level of detail I was looking for, but once he got into the elliptical math at the basis of the proof, Aczel's descriptions were not complete enough for my taste.

Longitude by Dava Sobel

This tidy little book sat on my bookshelf for years.  It's short - under 200 pages, and reads quickly. Its subtitle, "The True Story of a Lone Genius Who Solved the Greatest Scientific Problem of His Time" is accurate.

In the early 18th century, the problem of determining longitude at sea came to a head.  Latitude was easier to calculate based on the sun/stars, but the lack of being able to calculate longitude had resulted in many shipwrecks, costing sailors their lives and crowns their riches.  So the English Parliament put out a contest - whoever could figure out a way to calculate longitude accurately would win a cash prize large enough to sustain them for most of their life.

Most "contestants" aimed for a method that relied on celestial bodies, but one man (John Harrison) decided that clocks that kept accurate time at sea would be a more elegant way to solve the problem.  His lifework (and that of his son) became creating such a clock - not a simple feat in the 1700s.

This story - as depicted in the book - is fascinating.  There are the politics, the villains, and the science.  What's most amazing, however, is the intrigue - far more than you'd imagine in what seems like such a dry topic.  A good read.

A Year and Six Seconds by Isabel Gillies

Two summers ago, I couldn't put down Gillies first memoir, Happens Every Day, which chronicled the abrupt demise of her first marriage.  When I heard she had written a sequel about finding love a second time I looked forward to reading it.

This book picks up where the last one left off - Gillies is arriving in Manhattan, two toddlers in tow, to move in with her parents.  The first half of the book was similar to her first book; Gillies remains charming, modest, and honest.  I cheered for her when she accomplished victories like getting her son into a preschool mid-year, and I felt for her when she stumbled, like when she misunderstood her husband and thought he wanted to get back together.

However I didn't really enjoy the end of the book. About two-thirds of the way through, after a series of unsuccessful dates she meets a friend-of-a-friend named Peter and immediately falls in love.  In what seems like just months (I think that's true, actually), she is married to Peter and joining their families together.  I don't know if it was because I thought it was too fast, or Gillies thought it was too fast, but I fould the writing about this part of her life hurried, and defensive.  She breezes through the decision-making, the therapy, and the new life in a way that seemed unsustainable.

Hopefully her new marriage will be successful and long.  I'd enjoy reading another book by her about her adventures in blending her family with Peter's.

The Other Wes Moore by Wes Moore

I like the idea of this book - an investment banker with an "American dream" resume finds that someone has the same name as him, but is in prison for armed robbery.  He finds him and tells both of their stories.

Both Wes Moore and Wes Moore grow up in inner cities - one in Baltimore, the other begins his life in Baltimore but is raised in the Bronx.  Both are raised by single mothers, and as the book progresses, Moore does a fine job of reporting on what each of them was doing during different phases of childhood and adolesence.  One ends up mixed up in drugs, jail, and fathering several children as a teenager, while the other becomes a Rhodes Scholar after graduating from college. 

The book is not judgemental - if anything it is a little ascetic for such a personal story.  Moore makes the point in the foreword that he doesn't want to lessen the other Moore's crimes, but wants to dissect how they could start out with such similar odds and yet end up in such different places.  He punctuates that at the end with a multi-page resource guide for organziations that help children growing up in all sorts of situations.

I found this sentiment lofty, and admirable, but a strange end to the book.  I guess it's his way of not drawing any conclusions other than "we need to engage kids to get them on the right path," but I think there are some more conclusive distinctions to be drawn between the two Wes' upbringings and outcomes.  My other beef with this book is that it may have been too long.  It was not long from a page-count perspective, but I did feel like it may have been similarly effective as a piece of long-form journalism.

No Biking in the House without a Helmet by Melissa Fay Greene

This was a sweet memoir - easy to read & well-written.

Melissa and her husband had four biological children.  Just when they were beginning to go off to school, she and her husband decided to adopt a Roma boy from Eastern Europe.  Over the next few years they added four other children to the family, all from Ethiopia.  It reads like the plot for a feel-good movie but it is indeed a true story, which is what makes it so cool.

Greene is a journalist, and she does a good job of writing honestly about the decisions, the transitions, and all the aspects of the both difficult and joyful expansion of her family.  She was fortunate to have a supportive husband and welcoming children, but still suffered from post-adoption depression (akin to post-pardon depression), that she writes sadly of.  She writes of being overwhelmed the first few times she brings new children home - at the magnitude of the adjustment they will have to make, and the challenge of incorporating them into the family.  But she also writes of the big joy she felt when each child settles in and the daily joys of being a mother that she appreciates.

There are two parts of the book that stand out to me the most.  One is the repeated trips she makes to Ethiopia and how she meets each child, then has to wait (sometimes months or even a year) before she can bring them home during a follow-up trip.  She brings them toys and bonds with them and then has to leave them until the paperwork is done.  The other part of the book that stuck with me was when several of the older kids all leave for college, two of the younger children begin to fight - a lot.  She realizes that the older boys were playing a strong role in bringing order and fun into the family and their departure had a big toll in the family dynamic.

Kudos to Melissa Fay Greene, both for being a great mom to so many kids as well as for writing about it with such honesty.

Revolution: The Year I Fell in Love and Went to Join the War by Deb Olin Unferth

This memoir is about something that would never, ever, happen to me. 

While in college in the late 1980's, Deb Olin Unfirth decides to drop out of school and follow her boyfriend to Central America.  They were in search of a revolution to join, and it wasn't until they arrived that they figured out how difficult it was to find politically significant work. 

The number of ways that is different from my life is barely countable.  Of course I would never have dropped out of school, particularly not to follow a guy, and I wouldn't have gone to Central America even if I had.  Sure, I like travel and have been to some parts of the world that other people would find risky, but not without my American passport (xeroxed, carried by me and my traveling companion, as well as stored in my Gmail account), credit card (safely xeroxed as well as alerted one week ahead of time to my international travel), and Immodium A/D (both in my daypack and back at the hotel).  That was not how Deb traveled.

Her story is the opposite of all that - she lived with complete uncertainty, hopeful to find some civil war to assist with, riddled with diarrhea and bug bites, expired visas and no money, and several other maladies that would have sent me home immediately.  She was also struggling to figure out her relationship with her boyfriend / fiance who proposes to her in El Salvador but seems to be lacking some of the earnest commitment she herself has. Her newfound Christianity further complicated her already-complex relationship with her otherwise typical Jewish American family.

I enjoyed this book and looked forward to reading it each night.  It's told somewhat non-linearly, not as a factual depiction of what happened, but as a reverie on her experiences.  In the later chapters, she also depicts her return to Central America on subsequent visits, inserting some space for reflection on her younger self.

In the Garden of Beasts by Erik Larson

Yuck.

This book was the first pick of a new book club I just joined. By the author of Devil in the White City, this book is about Ambassador Dodd, the American ambassador to Germany.

I guess the story of his being the ambassador is interesting enough. Considered by many to be underqualified, he moves his family to Germany in the 1930's, refusing many of the benefits in housing and transportation that are offered an ambassador. His daughter, estranged from her husband in the U.S., becomes well-known in German society and I can't describe her as anything less juicy than a hussy. She sleeps with Nazis, Fascists, and several notable writers, seemingly blind to the potential damange it could do to her father's career.

I really disliked the writing style: it felt like I was reading something really dry for school. Occassionally, Larson would foreshadow something very deliberately, but I never appreciated the payoff. I know his previous books were well-liked, but I'm not sure if I'd try them.

Boomerang by Michael Lewis

Generally speaking I like Michael Lewis and this book was pretty good. Mostly it was a chronicle of his visits to several countries with massive economic problems in 2011: Iceland, Greece, Germany, Ireland, and California. (OK, California is not a country but he covers San Jose and some surrounding towns with similar attention.) I think it started as a series for Vanity Fair. He covers each country in its own chapter, exploring the parts of each culture that contributed to their economic issues. Iceland's insular nature, Germany's quest for external perfection, Greece's friendly corruption - each of these qualities discussed using Lewis' personal experiences with people he meets there. Unlike many of his other books, he doesn't make any grand conclusions in this one. Rather, reading it is like getting a set of detailed emails from a really smart friend who is traveling the world to figure out what is happening in the world economy.

The Big Short by Michael Lewis

I decided it was time for me to learn more about what happened with the bailout, so I took this off the bookshelf.  Web had read it a few months back.

Michael Lewis is one of my favorite non-fiction authors.  In past years I've read Moneyball, The Blind Side, and Liar's Poker.  Malcolm Gladwell describes him a "the finest storyteller of our generation" and I agree.  This book is about the financial meltdown.  Particularly, Lewis writes about a few oddball bankers, some on the fringe of Wall Street, who accurately predicted the mortgage-backed securities crisis.  Lewis profiles some colorful people on both sides of the situation - those who bet on these securities and those who bet against them. 

The most interesting part of the book, aside from the personalities, was that because he was profiling people who bet against the industry, he had to explain in detail to the reader one of the strangest financial instruments: the credit-default swap.  Basically a credit-default swap is insurance you buy against a particular security dropping in value, except you don't have to own the security to own the insurance.  It's a really strange security that spawns a really strange market that is at the core of the meltdown.  Michael Lewis says in his book, "Dear Reader: If you have followed the story this far, you deserve not only a gold star but also an answer to a complicated question..."  And thank goodness, because I sweated through a couple of those pages.

This book rounds out a few places where I've learned about the crisis; the same week I read this book we caught HBO's excellent Too Big to Fail documentary.  A few months ago I listened to This American Life's episode about Magnetar, one of the hedge funds in the middle of the crisis.  And last week's New York Times Magazine had a cover story on Sheila Bair, the outgoing chairwoman of the FDIC.  Together, those pieces of media gave me a good grounding on what the heck happened to our banks.

The Big Switch by Nicholas Carr

This is a technology/business book so if you read my blog purely for fun, you may want to skip this.  However, if you have even a small inkling of interest around technology, read on.

This book is about "the cloud."  The first half of the book skillfully compares the move to centralized generation and distribution of electricity to the move to centralized computing resources.  The analogy is fascinatingly accurate.  The second half of the book talks about what that means for the future of the IT industry and of our interactions with technology.  Carr uses great examples like Savvis, Google, and Microsoft to illustrate "cloud" technology.

What I really liked about this book is that Carr used examples that I think would be relevant if you didn't work in technology, but that were familiar to me as a technologist.  I also liked how accurately he described what was happening to technology as it moved into the cloud.  It definitely made me think about what my job would be twenty or even ten years from now.

What was most remarkable about reading this book is that it was published in 2009 and some of the predictions and novel concepts already seemed like second nature to me.  That made me respect Carr for his prescience but also regret my letting this languish on my "to read" list for so long.  Score one for not waiting for The Filter Bubble: What the Internet Is Hiding from You to come out in paperback.

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot

I had been excited about reading this book for a while  While it sat unread in my bookcase I caught a Law and Order episode based on the same idea. 

Henrietta Lacks is a black woman who lived in Maryland in the 1940's and '50s.  She had a very aggressive form of cervical cancer and after her death her cells were harvested without her family's knowledge.  Those cells have been a cornerstone of scientific research for the past several decades, while Lacks' family members have had marginal and oftentimes troubled lives.

Skloot's book reads like a novel in some places, a memoir in others, and an interesting article for the balance.  Never is it a dry scientific text, although it does cover the science behind cells and gene therapy.  I don't think you have to be technical to enjoy the book.  Other sections focus on Henrietta's childhood and illness.  Most memorable to me was the latter part of the book where Skloot forms a close relationship with Henrietta's daughter Deborah, now in her 60's, and the two of them work together to find more additional information about Henrietta. 

This was a good read, although more personal than I expected.  Skloot's a great writer.

Infidel by Ayaan Hirsi Ali

Ewa recommended this to me several years ago and although I have given it to several people as a gift I had not read it myself. 

Ali's memoir of her childhood in Africa and subsequent immigration to Europe is memorable and shocking.  She grows up in both Muslim Ethiopia and a secular Kenya, and as she gets older is troubled by the treatment of women in Islam.  Her childhood is very traditional - she is ritually circumcised, her absent father makes a lot of the family decisions, and she sees women being beholden to men's choices.  The first third of the book that covers this part of her life is gripping, but long.  At some points it was confusing as to why so much of the book was what felt like background.

The next part of the book chronicles her escape to the Netherlands where she seeks asylum and settles into this very different society.  She has a boyfriend and a job, and decompresses from her years of oppression.  The contrast between her life in the Netherlands and that of her life in Africa is where many of her political ideas come from.  At some point in the book she begins to argue quite aggressively that Islam is bad for women and thus bad for societies.  She suggests that any Islamic country is intrinsically backwards based on their treatment of women.

It is this core belief that begins Ali's ascent into politics, which is the subject of the third and final part of the book.  She becomes a highly public figure in Holland politics and, at times, is seen as quite contraversial.  As she struggles with the demands on her public life, she faces difficult choices in how much is at stake when she stands up for what she believes in.

I enjoyed reading about Ali's life and I appreciate the honesty in her memoir.  While the flow of the narrative was uneven, the story was fascinating. 

The Lost Dogs: Michael Vick's Dogs and Their Tale of Rescue and Redemption by Jim Gorant

This was a well-written book by a Sports Illustrated reported chronicling the story behind the dogs involved in Michael Vick's dogfighting group.  The first half focused on the discovery and investigation of Vick's dogfighting ring.  The second half of the book was about several individual dogs and the process of their being rehabilitated and adopted.  I could hardly put this book down.

The depiction of what dog fights are like and of the conditions in which fighting dogs are kept helped me understand for the first time exactly how terribly dogs are treated in this environment.  One of the methods Gorant used to describe these conditions was through imagining how a couple of the dogs might have felt during their time living at the dogfighting compound.  I thought this was an effective way to personalize (dog-ize?) a difficult topic. 

I really enjoyed reading about the rehabilitation.  Of the 50 dogs rescued from his property, I believe only 3 or 4 had to be put down for health or behavior issues.  While an initial assessment of the situation had experts believing that rescuing 5 dogs would be "good news", the panel of experts actually assigned to evaluate each dog found that most of them were unsocialized and/or scared, but very few were aggressive.  This is contrary to what the ASPCA had previously though about dogs rescued from fighting rings and the story of these dogs' rehabilitation has influenced the ASPCA to change their policy on dogfighting rescue dogs.  The stories of the individuals who worked with the dogs through this period, some of whom are also the people who end up adopting them, were riveting.  Tears came to my eyes often, reading of little victories that reminded me of my own dog's behavior as the dogs adjusted.

The only aspect of the book I did not connect to was the characterization of a few of the investigators.  I thought Gorant was trying to make that an equally compelling storyline but I just wasn't as interested in reading that as I was in reading about the dogs.  That aside, I am really glad I read this book and learned about the dogfighting culture and about the rehabilitation of these wonderful animals.