Narrative nonfiction at its best. I still can't believe all this really happened to one person. Louie's experiences give a perspective on -- as the subtitle so rightly says -- survival, resilience, and redemption that we all could use. Not a book or a person you'll forget easily. Kudos to Laura Hillenbrand for her gripping telling of this well-researched story. 
 Favorite quotes (more at Kindle highlights): 
 He told the principal that Louie craved attention but had never won it in the form of praise, so he sought it in the form of punishment. If Louie were recognized for doing something right, Pete argued, he'd turn his life around. 
 Though all three men faced the same hardship, their differing perceptions of it appeared to be shaping their fates. 
 This self-respect and sense of self-worth, the innermost armament of the soul, lies at the heart of humanness; to be deprived of it is to be dehumanized, to be cleaved from, and cast below, mankind. 
 (view spoiler)[On Kwajalein, Louie and Phil learned a dark truth known to the doomed in Hitler's death camps, the slaves of the American South, and a hundred other generations of betrayed people. Dignity is as essential to human life as water, food, and oxygen. The stubborn retention of it, even in the face of extreme physical hardship, can hold a man's soul in his body long past the point at which the body should have surrendered it. The loss of it can carry a man off as surely as thirst, hunger, exposure, and asphyxiation, and with greater cruelty. In places like Kwajalein, degradation could be as lethal as a bullet. (hide spoiler)] 
 The paradox of vengefulness is that it makes men dependent upon those who have harmed them, believing that their release from pain will come only when they make their tormentors suffer. 
 All he had left was his alcohol and his resentment, the emotion that, Jean Amery would write, "nails every one of us onto the cross of his ruined past."