"Unbroken" {by Laura Hillenbrand} Book Club Ideas

February 2013 Book Club

"When he thought of his history, what resonated with him now was not all that he had suffered but the divine love that he believed had intervened to save him."

— Laura Hillenbrand (Unbroken)

If you get a chance, watch this amazing video of Louis Zamperini talking about his life before and after "Unbroken" was published. He is beyond amazing!

 This month we tried something different for our menu. We asked everyone to find a recipe off Pinterest to inspire their food choices and we got some TASTY treats!

I believe many people were asking for recipes so please leave a comment in this post if there was one you were wanting!

Each month our book club continues to grow and add new members and this month was no exception! We are so excited to see April at book club again! life gets crazy sometimes and we totally understand needing to take a break from things until your ready to jump back in!

 we would also like to welcome Brooke's good friend Elizabeth! We hope you find yourself feeling at home with all of us and we are so glad to have you!

Lastly, we are SO happy to welcome Summer to our great group of girls who just moved BACK here from California after 5 years! We are thrilled to have you back Summer!

On a different note...

I decided it was time for our blog to get a face lift. Its important to me what our blog looks, feels and navigates like. Our blog is an extension of our "book club home" on the Internet, and I want it to be as welcoming and inviting as we are in person.

So I enlisted the help of my fabulous book club members to raise the money needed to purchase a custom blog design. And to my great joy, by the end of the night we'd raised ALL the money for us to get our blog the face lift it needs!

And thanks to Ashley at Ashley Ella Designs on Etsy, we will have our new custom blog by next book club meeting! (Eeeeps, I'm so excited!)

{Check out Ashley's blog to see more of her work.}

For every $5 donated, members got to add a ticket into the drawing for this beautiful leather bound copy of "Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea."

NOW, LET'S TALK ABOUT THE BOOK!

A little "DID YOU KNOW," about Louis Zamperini:

An athlete and a World War II vet, Zamperini cheated death in numerous and harrowing ways, shook Adolf Hitler's hand, and ran one event for his fourth time ever at the Berlin Olympics. Incidentally, at the age of 95, he is still alive and living in Southern California.

The following are astounding facts about Zamperini in chronological order:

• At 19 years old, Zamperini qualified for the Olympics in track and field after racing 5,000 meters for the second time ever.
• He wound up finishing in eight place at the Berlin, Germany, games in 1936. There, he met Adolf Hitler, who requested a meeting.
• He stole Hitler's personal Nazi flag, which he still has to this day. (See picture below)

The flag he snagged from the Reich Chancellery while running in the 1936 Berlin Olympics.

Zamperini joined the U.S. Army Air Corps in 1941, later flying several dangerous missions across the Pacific.

In the summer of 1943 he was the only man of an 11-man crew to ultimately survive an attack on their B-24 over the ocean.

Initially, Zamperini and two other crew members survived on a raft for several days, collecting rain water for drinking as well as the blood of the birds they would kill bare handed. Sharks would circle and brush up against their raft. One crew member died on day 33. The other two survived a total of 47 days.

They drifted 2000 miles to the Marshall Islands, where they're taken as prisoners by the Japanese.

Allied prisoners of war, who had the misfortune to reach Kwajalein, were usually killed. That is the reason it was known as "Execution Island."

Zamperini became a prisoner of war, enduring constant torture and starvation for two years.
He returned home to his family after the war ended in 1945 and married a Miami debutante a year later.


Louis Zamperini
Age 22 and 95

Questions That came up during our discussion were, “What makes it so hard to let resentment go?”  “What did Louie’s experience demonstrate to us?”  “What life lessons can we glean from his story?”  Want to know our answers to these questions and many more?

Read our full book review & star rating for Unbroken HERE