Dont Give Up Dont Give In

Champion. Survivor. Hero. Legend.

Completed just two days before Louis Zamperini’s death at age 97, Don’t Give Up, Don’t Give In shares a lifetime of wisdom, insight, and humor from one of America’s most inspiring lives. Louis Zamperini’s story has touched millions through Laura Hillenbrand’s biography Unbroken and the movie adaptation directed by Angelina Jolie. Here, in his own words, Zamperini reveals, with warmth and great charm, the essential values and lessons that sustained him throughout his remarkable journey.

He was a youthful troublemaker from California who turned his life around to become a 1936 Olympian and a world-class miler at the University of Southern California. Putting aside his superstar track career, he volunteered for the army before Pearl Harbor and was thrust into the violent combat of World War II as a B-24 bombardier. While on a rescue mission, his plane went down in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, where he survived, against all odds, drifting two thousand miles in a small raft for forty-seven days. His struggle was only beginning: Zamperini was captured by the Japanese, and, for more than two years, he courageously endured torture and psychological abuse in a series of prisoner-of-war camps. He returned home to face more dark hours, but in 1949 Zamperini’s life was transformed by a spiritual rebirth that would guide him through the next sixty-five years of his long and happy life.

Cowritten with longtime collaborator David Rensin, Louis Zamperini’s Don’t Give Up, Don’t Give In is an extraordinary last testament that captures the wisdom of a life lived to the fullest.