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Laura Hillenbrand

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Learn more about the author, Zamperini, and "Seabiscuit: An American Legend," at her website:
http://laurahillenbrandbooks.com
Also, you can read more about her coping and living with chronic fatigue syndrome at:
http://www.cfids-cab.org/MESA/Hillenbrand.html

Interested in the author?  Here is an article about Hillenbrand from the Washington Post.

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Laura Hillenbrand, in her Washington home, says she copes with her illness by detaching herself completely from aspirations. "I hardly ever listen to music anymore because it arouses all of this yearning in me," she says. (Bill O'leary/the Washington Post)
"Laura Hillenbrand releases new book while fighting chronic fatigue syndrome"

By Monica Hesse

Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, November 28, 2010; 7:21 PM

"Sometimes I fear that I dress really strangely," Laura Hillenbrand says. "Or maybe I don't speak normally, because language changes while I'm away."

Sometimes something will happen; she will walk into a CVS after years of not walking anywhere beyond the 1,500 square feet of her butter-yellow Glover Park rowhouse, and she will discover that automated registers have replaced human cashiers in the checkout lanes. She is, if she's being completely honest, still not entirely sure what a BlackBerry is. The technology invented for a mobile life is not necessary when your life is not mobile. "I've used a cellphone exactly twice," Hillenbrand, 43, says. "Things move on. The world changes. And I don't know it."

She sits at her kitchen table. She has a kind of indoor, Victorian beauty - soft and smooth, with pale, translucent skin.

In the small, contained, calibrated world of Laura Hillenbrand, actions take on a different sort of meaning. Triumphs are measured on a sliding scale. There was the huge triumph in 2001, the triumph of "Seabiscuit: An American Legend," the book that could about the horse that could, toppling bestseller charts and becoming an Academy Award-nominated movie.

Then there are the more recent wins. The time she managed to take an entire shower standing up. The time she and her husband, Borden Flanagan, drove to the alley at the end of their block so she could see something other than the cemetery behind their yard, and the time, a few weeks later, that they drove all the way to Starbucks. Sat in the parking lot. Drove home.



After the stunning success of "Seabiscuit," Hillenbrand suffered a relapse of the chronic fatigue syndrome that has ruled her life for more than two decades. From 2007 through the summer of 2009, she never left her house; for some of those months, she never left her room. Her relationship with Flanagan was pushed to its limits.

But all the while, she was calling people she was too weak to visit, and e-mailing the people she was too weak to call. She was requesting newspapers from archives and scanning forgotten POW lists. She was finding a guy who owned a clunky Norden bombsight and persuading him to set the contraption up on her kitchen table so she could understand how soldiers accurately dropped bombs during World War II. "We spent a while," she says delightedly, "bombing Phoenix."

Last week, after nearly a decade of laboring, Hillenbrand's second book was released - a biography of the Olympic runner whose dreams of breaking the four-minute mile were smashed by a plane crash and an unspeakable stay in a Japanese war camp. It is called "Unbroken."

An extraordinary life

"Laura told me she wanted to write my biography. I told her I was already finishing my [memoir]. She said, I must do it. I said, Laura, I've milked this thing dry. There's nothing left. She said, I must."

Louis Zamperini is 93. In his running days he was the most famous racing mammal aside from Seabiscuit, which is how Hillenbrand learned about him to begin with. Zamperini was frequently mentioned on the sports pages along with the horse she was profiling: his juvenile delinquent childhood, the redemption he found in running, the bitterness he felt when he returned from war and the soothing balm of forgiveness. His celebrated story had already been the subject of three books. When Hillenbrand phoned him, he couldn't imagine there was anything to add.

"But she found so many things," Zamperini says - prison diaries he hadn't known his fellow inmates were keeping, for example, or the fate of the boat that rescued him after his plane crash. "I have to call her and ask her what happened to me in certain prison camps."

For seven years, they developed a friendship in absentia. Zamperini didn't know why all of their conversations were over the phone until he read an interview with Hillenbrand and learned about her illness. Then, "I sent her one of my Purple Hearts. I said, you deserve this more than me." The book is 400 pages long. Hillenbrand interviewed Zamperini, who now lives in California, 75 times. She also spoke with his family, friends and former comrades, many of whom died before she could finish the work. "Unbroken" is a meticulous, soaring and beautifully written account of an extraordinary life.

Hillenbrand and Zamperini have never met face to face.

"I have to detach myself completely from aspirations," Hillenbrand says, discussing how she has learned to cope with her illness. "I hardly ever listen to music anymore because it arouses all of this yearning in me." She numbs herself to the things she cannot have.

Journalists have liked pointing out the irony of Hillenbrand's work: A woman for whom walking around the block constitutes a marathon writes about the finest specimens of physical endurance.

It's not irony, she says. It's escape. "I'm looking for a way out of here. I can't have it physically, so I'm going to have it intellectually. It was a beautiful thing to ride Seabiscuit in my imagination. And it's just fantastic to be there alongside Louie as he's breaking the NCAA mile record. People at these vigorous moments in their lives - it's my way of living vicariously."

In the nine years since "Seabiscuit" was published, Hillenbrand has become a receiver of narratives from fellow sufferers of CFS who want to either offer their help or ask for hers. When they can't get hold of Hillenbrand, they call her husband, leaving tear-filled messages at his American University office.

"There haven't been a lot of people who are coming forward to talk about this disease," she says ruefully. "We're all home in bed."



Asked to describe, in detail, what exactly the rather blithely named chronic fatigue syndrome feels like, Hillenbrand says, "I got sick when I was 19, and I'd been a really healthy 19-year-old, so I don't have a lot to compare it to. Does it feel like the pain after you give birth? I don't know." There is nauseating vertigo. On bad days, "if the house was burning down, I could not sit up. It's really a state of acute suffering when you get like that. It's kind of like pain, but . . . " she pauses. "I don't know how to describe it."

The woman who is able to spend paragraphs describing men who have been dead for decades, undergoing unparalleled human suffering, using records that almost no one knew existed, is unable to put into words the betrayal of her own body.

A tremendous love story

About six months ago, Hillenbrand and Flanagan, her husband, needed to replace a rug. Because Hillenbrand wasn't able to leave the house for a carpet-buying excursion, Flanagan went alone, taking pictures of the contenders with his cellphone.

In this house is a tremendous love story.

They'd met in college at a campus deli, her a sophomore, him a senior. They'd been dating for just five months when Hillenbrand got sick, which happened suddenly and nonsensically, like a book that has had all of its middle pages torn away. First, they and a friend were driving back to Kenyon College after spring break. Then, Hillenbrand could barely move. Food poisoning, doctors said, but it wasn't.

Eventually Hillenbrand was forced to leave Kenyon College. She relocated to Chicago where her boyfriend had been accepted to graduate school, but while visiting her mother in Maryland she collapsed and knew she'd never be strong enough for the flight back to Illinois. Washington became her default home. She and Flanagan remained apart until he could find a job in the area, at which point Washington became his default home, too.

"If you had asked the 21-year-old me, 'Would you like to be someone's caretaker for the rest of your life?' " Flanagan says, "I don't think our relationship was sufficiently evolved at that time." For years, they put off getting married; Hillenbrand wanted to be well before planning a wedding.

In the beginning, at least, "well" seemed like a reachable destination. It was ludicrous, really, to think things might not improve. "We didn't want to . . . adopt the attitude that she might not get better," Flanagan says. "When it became obvious she wasn't getting better, we'd been together for so long that marriage seemed . . . "

How much closer could a ceremony bind two people who had been through what they had?

When "Seabiscuit" became a bestseller, Flanagan threw open a second-story window and gleefully shouted the news to the neighborhood. The book was a rejoinder to anyone who had ever associated CFS with laziness. And it felt good, Hillenbrand says wryly, "being able to be something other than [Flanagan's] invalid girlfriend."

But the success of Hillenbrand's book also helped uncover a cache of emotions that Flanagan had been hiding about her illness. He was exhausted, terrified, frustrated, sad. But he feared that sharing any of this with Hillenbrand would only tax her health further, and so he was also isolated from the one person he wanted to talk to.



"I started to have doubts," he says, asking himself if he was with her out of moral duty. "I tried to persuade myself that I didn't love her."

"I thought, 'Now she's wealthy,' " he remembers. "Now I won't be the world's worst bastard if I leave."

He came to her one night in June with all of these confessions, but the resulting conversations only made their relationship stronger.

"I had to persuade myself it was possible for me to leave," Flanagan says, "before I could realize that I didn't want to."

They were married in 2008, during a good spell, at the Hay-Adams Hotel downtown. Hillenbrand was seated for the ceremony, and wasn't strong enough for the reception. She thinks the cake had alternating layers, chocolate and vanilla-apricot, but she doesn't remember because she didn't get to taste it herself.

No matter. It was, both agree, a beautiful wedding.

Point of departure

In the carefully calibrated world of Laura Hillenbrand, every reaction has an equal and opposite reaction. On one day, she might agree to an interview but skip a shower. Energy is finite, and she typically has enough for one activity a day. She is constantly measuring herself, monitoring herself. She might write a bestseller - she might write two - but the ensuing fame will touch her only tangentially. She will not see her books in Barnes & Noble. She will not move into a bigger house; too much more space would be overwhelming.

People ask, sometimes, whether she would consider writing a book about chronic fatigue syndrome. She doesn't plan on it. She already knows what that life is like.

Before she got sick, she loved to travel. Now, when she is well enough, her favorite thing is to drive down to Reagan National Airport and sit in view of the runway. She loves the big openness of the runway, and the fact that she can see very far away.

It's a gateway to another world.


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Here is an interview with Louis from Runner's World Magazine:
http://www.runnersworld.com/article/1,7124,s6-243-297--13773-0,00.html

And Billy Grahm's website:
http://www.billygraham.org/articlepage.asp?articleid=7916

Readalikes
If you liked Unbroken, try these:

Broken Jewel

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Broken Jewel
by David L. Robbins New York Times bestselling author David L. Robbins presents a riveting novel of war, love, and survival, set against the backdrop of an improbable rescue, the Los Baños prison raid -- one of the most daring episodes of World War II.

Ghost Soldiers

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Ghost Soldiers
by Hampton Sides Utterly compelling and impressively detailed - dramatically recounts the story behind the Bataan Death March and the realities of survival in a Japanese prison camp. A true-to-life narrative as intelligently orchestrated and satisfying as the raid that ultimately liberated these men."

Discussion Questions: Unbroken: A WWII Story of Survival, Resiliance and Redemption, by Laura Hillenbrand

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These questions are from Hillenbrand's website and can be located at:
http://laurahillenbrandbooks.com/discussion-questions/

1. Louie’s experiences are singular: None of us is going to be in a plane crash, strafed by a bomber, attacked by sharks, cast away on a raft, or held as a POW. And yet the word most often used to describe him is “inspiring.” What does Louie’s experience demonstrate that makes him so inspirational to people who will never endure what he did? What are the lessons that his life offers to all of us?

2. Is Louie a hero? How do you define heroism?

3. In Louie’s boyhood, he was severely bullied, then became a delinquent and hellraiser. In these experiences, did he already display attributes that would help him survive his wartime ordeal? Did he also show weaknesses or tendencies that foreshadowed the struggles he would face postwar?

4. Did Louie’s athletic career help prepare him for what he would face in war?

5. Louie was especially close to his brother Pete, who devoted himself to him. If Pete hadn’t been there, what would have become of Louie? Does Pete deserve credit for shaping Louie into a man who could endure and survive his Odyssean ordeal?

6. Hillenbrand explores the extraordinary risks faced by America’s WWII airmen: 54,000 men killed in combat, 36,000 killed in noncombat aircraft accidents, and a stunning 15,000 men killed in stateside training—at times, an average of 19 per day. Men faced a 50% chance of being killed during combat tours of only 30-40 missions. Were you aware of the dangers faced by airmen in the Pacific war? What facts and stories were most surprising to you?

7. What are your feelings about Mac? Do you feel sympathy for him? Anger? If you endured the trauma of a plane crash, and were placed in a situation that you knew very few men survived, might you have reacted as he did? In the end, did he redeem himself?

8. When Louie, Phil and Mac were on the raft, a key factor in their survival was optimism. All three men were young and able-bodied, veterans of the same training, experiencing the same hardships and traumas, yet Louie and Phil remained optimistic while Mac was hopeless, seemingly doomed by his pessimism. Why are some people hopeful, and others not? How important is attitude and mindset in determining one’s ability to overcome hardship?

9. What did you find most remarkable about the things Louie and Phil did to survive on the raft?

10. Over 47 days on the raft, the men lost half their body weight, and were rendered mere skeletons. Yet they refused to consider cannibalism, which had not been uncommon among castaways before them. Would you, in the same situation, ever consider cannibalism? If it could ensure that two men survived, when otherwise all three would almost certainly perish, would it be a moral decision?

11. Louie believed he was the beneficiary of several miracles, among them his escape from the wreckage of his plane, the fact that he and the other men were not hit with bullets when their rafts were strafed, and the appearance of the singers in the clouds. What is your interpretation of those experiences?

12. The POWs took enormous risks to carry out thefts, sabotage, and other acts of defiance. Men would risk their lives to steal items as trivial as pencil boxes. What benefit did they derive from defiance that was worth risking death, or severe beatings?

13. In the 1930s and 1940s, Germany and Japan carried out what are arguably the worst acts of mass atrocity in history. What leads individuals, and even whole societies, to descend to such a level? What motivated the notoriously sadistic POW camp guards in Japan, particularly the Bird? Do we all carry the capacity for cruelty?

14. After the war, Louie would say that of all the horrors he witnessed and experienced in the war, the death of the little duck, Gaga, was the worst. Why was this event especially wrenching for him and the other POWs?

15. Louie, Frank Tinker, and William Harris planned to escape from Ofuna, walk across Japan, steal a boat and make a run for China. It was an attempt that very likely would have ended in their deaths. Was it foolish, or did it offer a psychological benefit that was worth the enormous risk?

16. Louie joined a plot to kill the Bird. Was he justified in doing so? Would it have been a moral act? Do you think Louie could have found peace after the war, had he killed the Bird?

17. Unbroken reveals that, under the “kill-all order,” the Japanese planned to murder all POWs, a plan that was never carried out because of the dropping of the atomic bombs. The book also explores the lengths to which the Japanese were prepared to go to avoid surrender. How did the book make you feel about America’s use of the atomic bomb on Japan?

18. “Anger is a justifiable and understandable reaction to being wronged, and as the soul’s first effort to reassert its worth and power, it may initially be healing,” Laura Hillenbrand wrote in an article for Guideposts magazine. “But in time, anger becomes corrosive. To live in bitterness is to be chained to the person who wounded you, your emotions and actions arising not independently, but in reaction to your abuser. Louie became so obsessed with vengeance that his life was consumed by the quest for it. In bitterness, he was as much a captive as he’d been when barbed wire had surrounded him.” Do you agree?

19. Many of us struggle to forgive those who have wronged us, but forgiveness is often so difficult to find. What makes it so hard to let resentment go?

20. “What the Bird took from Louie was his dignity; what he left behind was a pervasive sense of helplessness and worthlessness,” Hillenbrand continued in her Guideposts article. “As I researched Louie’s life, interviewing his fellow POWs and studying their memoirs and diaries, I discovered that this loss of dignity was nearly ubiquitous, leaving the men feeling defenseless and frightened in a world that had become menacing. The postwar nightmares, flashbacks, alcoholism and anxiety that were endemic among them spoke of souls in desperate fear. Watching these men struggle to overcome their trauma, I came to believe that a loss of self-worth is central to the experience of being victimized, and may be what makes its pain particularly devastating.” Do you agree?

21. Hillenbrand wrote that among the former POWs she interviewed, forgiveness became possible once the POW had found a way to restore his sense of dignity. Was this what Billy Graham gave to Louie? If so, what was it about that experience, and that sermon, gave Louie back his self-worth?

22. Do Louie Zamperini’s wartime and postwar experiences give you a different perspective on a loved one who was, or is, a veteran?

23. Why has most WWII literature focused on the European war, with so little attention paid to the Pacific war?



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