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How unlikely is this. A neighbor boy, maybe 11-years-old, maybe 13-years-old, notorious along the block for mischief and misbehavior, comes to your door and asks the run of your kitchen to bake biscuits. You invite him in and tell him to get on with his task.

All right. It could happen. What are neighbors for after all.

Laura Hillenbrand recounts this incident in a single sentence in, “Unbroken,�� her popular story of World War II survivor Louis Zamperini. �� [Louie] baked biscuits and gave them away; when his mother, tired of the mess, booted him from her kitchen, he resumed baking in a neighbor’s house…��

Now consider this -

The same young boy, “While his father was out of town…overhauled the engine on the family’s Marmon Roosevelt Straight-8 sedan.��

A keg of beer weighs 160.5 pounds. This is a latter-day aluminum keg of beer. Louis Zamperini, born in 1917, was coming of age when beer kegs still were the work of coopers, fashioned from heavy wood staves. Hillenbrand tells readers, “At another party, [Louis] absconded with an entire keg of beer.�� The boy could not have weighed as much as the beer barrel with which he was absconding.

Louis was on a neighborhood dinner-party list. “When a local family took Louie off their dinner-guest list, he broke into their house, bribed their Great Dane with a bone, and cleaned out their ice box.�� (Cleaned it into what? He carried a great cardboard box with him? He heaped a quart of milk atop the orange juice, butter and apple sauce?)

Louie “Skulked down alleys, a roll of lock picking wire [?] in his pocket. Housewives who stepped from their kitchens would return to find their suppers had disappeared.�� The cardboard box once again? Still-frying pork chops, boiled potatoes, a saucepan of corn, chocolate cake all quickly, surreptitiously piled in that box and ferreted away?

So the accounts multiply. The boy went to a pasture and tried to ride a steer. His rear-end was blasted with rock salt as a furious farmer went after him with a shotgun. He “beat a kid badly, leaving him unconscious in a ditch…afraid he’d killed him…��

He “pelted a policeman with rotten tomatoes.�� There was a whole patch of rotten tomatoes? The policeman was standing near that patch? The police was unable to dodge the missiles the boy was lobbing?

The boy stole things besides family suppers and the contents of ice boxes. “To minimize the evidence found on him when the police habitually came his way, he set up loot-stashing sites around town, including a three-seater cave that he dug in a nearby forest.�� (You know how those forests grow up around California towns.)

Reader: you think you have read an exhaustive account?

You are wrong.

There was the day his mother persuaded a locomotive engineer to stop a train and to put the train in reverse to search for Louie, who had leaped from the caboose.

There are perhaps two dozen additional anecdotes, some them even more incredible. Besides these, there are stories of the mother who walked into a butcher shop with a frying pan to hit the butcher over his head because she was dissatisfied with meat she had purchased.

All this in the first nine pages.

Suffice to establish that, “Unbroken,�� and Louis Zamperini’s World War II saga must be taken with more than a bit of salt.