Devil at My Heels: A World War II Hero's Saga of Torment, Survival, and Forgiveness: A World War II Hero's Epic Saga of Torment, Survival, and Forgiveness - Rilegato

Zamperini, Louis; Rensin, David

Rilegato

ISBN 10: 006018860X ISBN 13: 9780060188603

Casa editrice: William Morrow & Co, 2003

Riassunto

A motivational speaker and former POW recounts his athletic southern California childhood, participation in the 1936 Olympics, imprisonment and torture by an abusive Japanese guard, descent into alcoholism, and salvation by preacher Billy Graham.

Su questo libro

L'autore:

A son of Italian immigrants, Louis Zamperini (1917-2014) was a U.S. Olympic runner, World War II bombardier, and POW survivor. After the war, he returned to the United States to found the Victory Boys Camp for at-risk youth and became an inspirational speaker. Zamperini's story was told in his 2003 autobiography Devil at My Heels, as well as in Laura Hillenbrand's 2010 biography Unbroken.

Dalla quarta di copertina:

A juvenile delinquent, a world-class NCAA miler, a 1936 Olympian, a World War II bombardier: Louis Zamperini had a life fuller than most when it changed in an instant. On May 27, 1943, his B-24 crashed into the Pacific Ocean. Louis and two other survivors found a raft amid the flaming wreckage and waited for rescue. Instead, they drifted two thousand miles for forty-seven days. Their only food: two shark livers and three raw albatross. Their only water: sporadic rainfall. Their only companions: hope and faith -- and the ever-present sharks.

On the forty-seventh day, mere skeletons close to death, Zamperini and pilot Russell Phillips finally spotted land -- and were captured by the Japanese. Thus began more than two years of torture and humiliation as prisoners of war.

Zamperini was threatened with beheading, subjected to medical experiments, routinely beaten, hidden in a secret interrogation facility, starved and forced into slave labor, and was the constant victim of a brutal prison guard nicknamed the Bird -- a man so vicious that the other guards feared him and called him a psychopath. Meanwhile, the Army Air Corps declared Zamperini dead and President Roosevelt sent official condolences to his family, who never gave up hope that he was alive.

Somehow Zamperini survived and he returned home a hero. The celebration was short-lived. He plunged into drinking and brawling and the depths of rage and despair. Nightly, the Bird's face leered at him in his dreams. It would take years, but with the love of his wife and the power of faith, he was able to stop the nightmares and the drinking.

A stirring memoir from one of the greatest of the "Greatest Generation," Devil at My Heels is a living document about the brutality of war, the tenacity of the human spirit, and the power of forgiveness.

Su questa edizione

• Editore: William Morrow & Co
• Data di pubblicazione: 2003
• ISBN 10: 006018860X
• ISBN 13: 9780060188603
• Rilegatura: Copertina rigida
• Numero edizione: 1
• Numero di pagine: 288