Unbroken

Laura Hillenbrand's biography of Louis Zamperini follows a boyhood delinquent from Torrance, California, who turned his defiance into running and raced the 5,000 meters at the 1936 Berlin Olympics. When war came he became a bombardier in the Army Air Forces, and in 1943 his bomber crashed into the Pacific. Zamperini then spent 47 days adrift on a raft, then more than two and a half years in three Japanese prisoner of war camps. Hillenbrand found his story in a 1938 newspaper article while researching her earlier book, Seabiscuit. Published in 2010, it remained a best seller for more than four years, 14 weeks of them at number one, and became a 2014 film directed by Angelina Jolie.

James Mattis included it on the list of favorite books in an appendix to Call Sign Chaos.