Unbroken

An excerpt of the review of Laura Hillenbrand's new book, Unbroken, by Steve Oney for WSJ.com

With a fringe of white hair poking out from under a University of Southern California baseball cap and blue eyes sharp behind bifocals, 93-year-old Louis Zamperini refuses to concede much to old age. He still works a couple of hours each day in the yard of his Hollywood Hills home, bagging leaves, climbing stairs and, on occasion, trimming trees with a chainsaw. His outlook is upbeat, even rambunctious. "I have a cheerful countenance at all times," he says. "When you have a good attitude your immune system is fortified." But as he plunged into "Unbroken," Laura Hillenbrand's 496-page story of his life, the happy trappings of his current existence fell away.

"Unbroken" will be published Nov. 16 with a first printing of 250,000 copies. Its publisher, Random House, hopes to repeat the success it enjoyed with "Seabiscuit," Ms. Hillenbrand's 2001 best seller, which has six million books in print and became a hit movie. "We're positioning it as the big book for the holidays," says a Barnes & Noble buyer.

One of the many notable aspects of "Unbroken" is that its author has never met her subject. Suffering from a debilitating case of chronic fatigue syndrome, she was unable to travel to Los Angeles from her Washington, D.C., home. She did the bulk of her research by phone and over the Internet, which enabled her to zero in on key collections at such institutions as the National Archives.