Unbroken

I recently Started the book Unbroken by Laura Hillenbrand, about the amazing story of Louie Zamperini's World War Two experiences. He starts out as the young town criminal at a young age, but then converts his talents from running away, to running track. Through his hard work and hard coaching by his brother, Pete, he becomes a top runner, blowing out opponents by his sophomore year. He then attends USC and quickly becomes one of the best runners in the nation, qualifying and getting sixth place in the olympics as the youngest man in the field. A year before the next olympics, which he is favored to win, the war starts. He is enlisted into the air force, and quickly becomes friends with Russell Phillips (known as Phil), his pilot. Together with their crew, they succeed in many hard missions, until are sent to rescue a lost plane. Their engines fail, and are sent plummeting to the vast Pacific. Three men survive: Louie, Phil and Mac. They fight off sharks, catch fish and birds, and survive an attack by a Japanese plain from a life raft. They have been on the ocean for 40 days now, and Mac has just died.

What I find most amazing about their story is how they kept sane during forty days of boredom, extreme pain, hunger, thirst and fatigue. Stories are told in the book of people who have started hallucinating and going crazy after fifteen to twenty days. The book tells that Phil and Louie stay sane, and even improve their memory and imagination by quizzing each other on song lyrics and recipes, along with anything they can think of, for weeks upon weeks. My question is, how would this occupy them and keep them sane for forty days? It does make a little sense, that something distracting them from a sense of hopelessness and despair would help.

So far, the book has been great, and I recommend it to everybody to read.