Like everyone
Is the truth strange?
Like everyone else who read it, I loved "Seabiscuit".  Loved it.  I found this surprising given the fact that I had never had any interest in horses or horse racing before.  But from the first sentence, the prose in that book is as beautiful and engaging as prose can be."Unbroken" is not "Seabiscuit".  Don't get me wrong, the story is remarkable, and it's exhaustively researched.  You can't sneeze at 397 endnotes.  But Laura Hillenbrand's writing in this outing is less like poetry and more like reporting.  Jammed with details, the book reads like the world's longest New Yorker article.The topic is hardly new.  WWII has been pretty exhaustively covered, and this particular story has been told before.  The hero of the book, Louis Zamperini, published his own memoirs only a few years ago.  The hardships of war and the cruelty of the Japanese come as no surprise.Louie's story is so remarkable and so detailed that, frankly, it strains the limits of credulity.  I'm not challenging the facts; I'm just saying that it's a lot to remember.  Personally, I wouldn't even want to.  I wouldn't have lasted 10 minutes drifting in that life raft.  I would have eaten all the chocolate and stuck my head in a shark.  How anyone could remember the ordeal in hour-by-hour detail is beyond me.Ultimately, I couldn't finish the book.  I feel bad that I didn't have the strength to read the experiences someone else had to live, but I gave up on about my third POW camp.  Starvation, deprivation, cruelty, disease, humiliation, I got the picture.  Repeated cycles don't necessarily make for a great story; it just makes for a tedious narrative.Which made me ponder the purpose of the book.  As a moving story, it's too detailed to carry a theme.  As reporting, it's redundant and profoundly out of date.  What's the take-away message supposed to be?I tried to skip to the end, but the `redemption' part just didn't grab me.  It's not hard to believe that someone who lived this life would be scarred forever.  I practically got PTSD just reading it.  It's also not hard to believe someone who got that scarred would find religion.  But, redemption?  In don't know.Sometimes people just go on living, and there's no telling why. 