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Remember when we used to have live TV and stations would air previews for a program they were trying to promote? Have you ever then gone and watched that program only to discover that the preview was kind of misleading?

Well, the previews for this book are wicked misleading. Everything about it—the jacket cover, the ...ok, maybe just the jacket cover and the book description—led me to believe this was a story about a World War II soldier lost at sea. And yes, there is certainly a section of the book that chronicles the experiences of a few Army Air Force personnel who become stranded on a raft in the South Pacific following the crash of their bomber, but the scope of the narrative encompasses much more than that. In fact, the “raft stuff� doesn’t even constitute the most compelling parts of this book. So what gives, Random House? Why you be unnecessarily deceitful?

What’s appreciable about Hillenbrand, who by the way suffers from a chronically debilitating disease which often leaves her confined to her home for days at a time (I don’t know why I felt the need to mention that), is her ability to relay a story that depicts a person at what we imagine to be his worst, only to reveal slowly a situation of progressively deepening madness, and she accomplishes this without running out of adjectival modifiers that would otherwise be needed to bring the reader’s jaw closer and closer to the floor. In other words, Hillenbrand knows how to tell a story, and this book, a biography of Olympic runner Louis Zamperini, which focuses on his life in a Japanese POW camp, is a prime example.