Five Minute Friday ~ Fly

So I read this book last weekend as we were flying down the highway at 75ish miles per hour. It was really more of the kind of book Tim would typically read, but I guess I liked the cover so I'd picked it up. Speaking of hubby, he decided that 75 mph wasn't good for the gas mileage and decided to fly a little lower and slower on the way home. But I digress. Is there any easy way to cover 1300ish miles in three days?

Part of the time we spent driving through THIS storm... hoping we didn't run into any flying objects due to the high speed wind gusts. I'm still digressing...

So what was the name of the book?

Unbroken (by Laura Hillenbrand).

Perhaps because my grandfather, a WW2 vet, had just passed away - AND I was looking for a distraction for the long ride down to his funeral so I didn't keep relapsing into tears, I bought this as well as the birthday gift for one of my son's classmates that originally spurred me to visit Barnes and Noble last Friday night. I think I had finished the book before Effingham.

It wasn't that the writing was riveting. In fact, while the details and incidents that are described in this account are always fascinating, the writing seemed stilted, quite dry and boring. The story of Louie Zamperini's life, however? It was anything but...

Hoodlum turned Olympic runner drafted to become a B-24 bombardier who's plane crashed in the Pacific Ocean twisting him and his fellow survivors into shark bait and target practice for Japanese aircraft for a death-defying length of time until finally, they escaped by drifting helplessly into the Marshall Islands where he and one remaining survivor disappeared without a trace, lost in the clutches of the Japanese POW "machine" for the next two plus years.

Literally, this guy's bio reads like the script of a movie that couldn't possibly be true, except that it was.

But my favorite parts of his story centered on his perseverance and indomitable, almost unconquerable spirit... many glimpses of kindness and caring in unexpected ways and places... and how Zamperini finally breaks and but then finds hope that does even more than merely mend and restore.

A story that might have never been had Zamperini not climbed into a plane no longer truly flight-worthy.

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Join the 5 Minute Friday community over at Lisa-Jo's, as many take their own turn writing on today's word: fly.

Hope to see you there.