Book Club Meeting #2

During our first book club meeting, we discussed the lenghths of Lauren Hillenbrand must have gone to in order to aquire all the infomration she did for this book. We assumed she interviews close to 20 people. I did a google search and found an article in the New Yorker discussing Hillenbrands writing process. Here is what she said about researching for the novel:
"My research began with a huge number of interviews, not only with Louie, but with his family members and friends going back to childhood, his fellow Olympians, airmen and P.O.W.s, Japanese POW camp officials, and the family members of those close to Louie during the war. Louie mailed me his Olympic, war and P.O.W. diaries, a lifetime of letters, photographs, and scrapbooks going back to 1917; one scrapbook weighed sixty-three pounds! The daughter of Russell Phillips, Louie’s best friend, pilot and fellow raft survivor, sent me stacks of her father’s war letters. I found a giant trove of documents in the National Archives, and in archives all over the world, I found treasures, including a secret P.O.W. diary kept by Commander John Fitzgerald, the ranking POW all three camps with Louie. I pored over published memoirs of Louie’s fellow prisoners and airmen as well as unpublished memoirs sent to me by former airmen and P.O.W.s, or their widows."

Here is the link to the rest of the article.
http://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/the-exchange-laura-hillenbrand


It is interesting to see how a work like "Unbroken" is created. It seems intimidating to take on the story of another man's life, however, in this interview Hillenbrand seemed confident and excited about where her research lead her. I am sure I would be too after selling millions of copies and having a feature film in production...