05/25/2011 05:11PM
This book is not a book about canoring, but it is an amazing read:
"Unbroken" by Laura Hillenbrand (author of "Seabiscuit")
Louis Zamperini has lived an amazing life. He ran in the Olympics, met Adolf Hitler and spent more than two years as a POW. Now a movie about his life starring Nicolas Cage is in the works. But this feisty Italian’s greatest adventure came when God broke through his gruff exterior and changed his life forever.
This book was an incredible story of the life of Louis Zamperini. In boyhood, he'd been a cunning and incorrigible delinquent, breaking into houses, brawling, and fleeing his home to ride the rails. As a teenager, he'd channeled his defiance into running, discovering a prodigious talent that carried him to the Berlin Olympics, an encounter with Hitler, and within site of the impossible 4-minute mile. When the WWII came, the athlete had become a bombardier, embarking on a journey of amazing missions, leading to his doomed flight and crash, left drifting at sea in a small raft with 2 others. His 47 day ordeal over thousands of miles of open ocean documents his experiences with sharks, typhoon, thirst and starvation, enemy aircraft, and more. Finally drifting ashore into the hands of Japanese soldiers, he then began an amazing survival story as a prisoner-of-war, lasting over 2 years. His torture and enduring fight is an incredible part of this book. Finally, when it's over, he reunites with the family that never lost faith, even when the U. S. had declared him dead. Post war depression almost ruined his life, but God became an important part of his remaining life. As the book closes, he is carrying the torch at the Nagano Olympics, a route that took him past one of his prisoner-of-war camps.
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