Tells of a British soldier's ordeal as a prisoner of war and how he was able fifty years later to meet his torturer and offer forgiveness.

Here is a remarkable true story of forgiveness--a tremendous testament to the courage that propels one toward remembrance, and finally, peace with the past. A classic war autobiography, The Railway Man is a powerful tale of survival and of the human capacity to understand even those who have done us unthinkable harm. From The Railway Man: The passion for trains and railroads is, I have been told, incurable. I have also learned that there is no cure for torture. These two afflictions have been intimately linked in the course of my life, and yet through some chance combination of luck and grace I have survived them both. I was born in Edinburgh, in the lowlands of Scotland, in 1919. My father was an official in the General Post Office there, a career which he had started as a boy of 16 and which he intended me to imitate to the letter. He was fascinated by telephony and telegraphy, and I grew up in a world in which tinkering and inventing and making were honoured past-times. I vividly remember the first time that my father placed a giant set of headphones around my ears and I heard, through the hiss and buzz of far-off-energies, a disembodied human voice. In the worst times, much later, when I thought I was about to die in pain and shock at the hands of men who could not imagine anything of my life, who had no respect for who I was or my history, I might have wished that my father had had a different passion. But in the 1920s, technology was still powerful and beautiful without being menacing. Who would have thought that a radio, for example, could cause terrible harm? It seemed to be a wonderful instrument by which people could speak to each other; and yet I heard Hitler ranting over airwaves, and saw two men beaten to death for their part in making such an instrument, and suffered for my own part in it for a half a century.

Winner of the PEN/Ackerley Prize The Railway Man is a remarkable memoir of forgiveness—a tremendous testament to the courage that propels one toward remembrance, and finally, peace with the past. Eric Lomax, sent to Malaya in World War II, was taken prisoner by the Japanese and put to punishing work on the notorious Burma-Siam railway. After the radio he illicitly helped to build in order to follow war news was discovered, he was subjected to two years of starvation and torture. He would never forget the interpreter at these brutal sessions. Fifty years after returning home from the war, marrying, and gaining the strength from his wife Patti to fight his demons, he learned the interpreter was alive. Through letters and meeting with his former torturer, Lomax bravely moved beyond bitterness drawing on an extraordinary will to extend forgiveness. Now a major motion picture starring Colin Firth and Nicole Kidman.

Winner of the PEN/Ackerley Prize The Railway Man is a remarkable memoir of forgiveness—a tremendous testament to the courage that propels one toward remembrance, and finally, peace with the past. Eric Lomax, sent to Malaya in World War II, was taken prisoner by the Japanese and put to punishing work on the notorious Burma-Siam railway. After the radio he illicitly helped to build in order to follow war news was discovered, he was subjected to two years of starvation and torture. He would never forget the interpreter at these brutal sessions. Fifty years after returning home from the war, marrying, and gaining the strength from his wife Patti to fight his demons, he learned the interpreter was alive. Through letters and meeting with his former torturer, Lomax bravely moved beyond bitterness drawing on an extraordinary will to extend forgiveness. Now a major motion picture starring Colin Firth and Nicole Kidman.

#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • NOW A MAJOR MOTION PICTURE • Look for special features inside. Join the Random House Reader’s Circle for author chats and more. In boyhood, Louis Zamperini was an incorrigible delinquent. As a teenager, he channeled his defiance into running, discovering a prodigious talent that had carried him to the Berlin Olympics. But when World War II began, the athlete became an airman, embarking on a journey that led to a doomed flight on a May afternoon in 1943. When his Army Air Forces bomber crashed into the Pacific Ocean, against all odds, Zamperini survived, adrift on a foundering life raft. Ahead of Zamperini lay thousands of miles of open ocean, leaping sharks, thirst and starvation, enemy aircraft, and, beyond, a trial even greater. Driven to the limits of endurance, Zamperini would answer desperation with ingenuity; suffering with hope, resolve, and humor; brutality with rebellion. His fate, whether triumph or tragedy, would be suspended on the fraying wire of his will. Appearing in paperback for the first time—with twenty arresting new photos and an extensive Q&A with the author—Unbroken is an unforgettable testament to the resilience of the human mind, body, and spirit, brought vividly to life by Seabiscuit author Laura Hillenbrand. Hailed as the top nonfiction book of the year by Time magazine • Winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for biography and the Indies Choice Adult Nonfiction Book of the Year award “Extraordinarily moving . . . a powerfully drawn survival epic.”—The Wall Street Journal “[A] one-in-a-billion story . . . designed to wrench from self-respecting critics all the blurby adjectives we normally try to avoid: It is amazing, unforgettable, gripping, harrowing, chilling, and inspiring.”—New York “Staggering . . . mesmerizing . . . Hillenbrand’s writing is so ferociously cinematic, the events she describes so incredible, you don’t dare take your eyes off the page.”—People “A meticulous, soaring and beautifully written account of an extraordinary life.”—The Washington Post “Ambitious and powerful . . . a startling narrative and an inspirational book.”—The New York Times Book Review “Magnificent . . . incredible . . . [Hillenbrand] has crafted another masterful blend of sports, history and overcoming terrific odds; this is biography taken to the nth degree, a chronicle of a remarkable life lived through extraordinary times.”—The Dallas Morning News “An astonishing testament to the superhuman power of tenacity.”—Entertainment Weekly “A tale of triumph and redemption . . . astonishingly detailed.”—O: The Oprah Magazine “[A] masterfully told true story . . . nothing less than a marvel.”—Washingtonian “[Hillenbrand tells this] story with cool elegance but at a thrilling sprinter’s pace.”—Time “Hillenbrand [is] one of our best writers of narrative history. You don’t have to be a sports fan or a war-history buff to devour this book—you just have to love great storytelling.”—Rebecca Skloot, author of The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks

This is the story of innocence betrayed, of passion and curiosity about the world of machines turned nightmarish and punished by the cruelty of which only humans are capable. It is also a story of survival and courage. Eric Lomax was tortured by the Japanese on the Burma-Siam Railway. Fifty years later he met one of his tormentors.

"He survived brutality, sickness, and war, but he refused to give up hope. Loet Velmans was seventeen when Germany invaded his native Holland in 1940. He and his family escaped to London just before the Dutch army surrendered and German U-boats began their deadly patrol of the North Sea. Deciding they would be safer in the Far East, the Velmans family sailed to the Dutch East Indies--now Indonesia--where Loet joined the Dutch army. In March 1942, the Japanese invaded, conquered the colony in a week without firing a shot, and imprisoned all Dutch soldiers. For three and a half years, Loet toiled in slave-labor camps building the railway made famous by The Bridge on the River Kwai, which would supply the Japanese invasion of India. Some 200,000 POW's and laborers died building this Railway of Death. Loet suffered malaria, dysentery, malnutrition, and unspeakable abuse, but never gave up hope. Almost sixty years later he returned to the place where he nearly died and where he buried his best friend in a burlap sack. From that emotional visit comes this stunning memoir" -- Back cover.

The New York Times bestselling account of one of history's most brutal—and forgotten—massacres, when the Japanese army destroyed China's capital city on the eve of World War II, "piecing together the abundant eyewitness reports into an undeniable tapestry of horror". (Adam Hochschild, Salon) In December 1937, one of the most horrific atrocities in the long annals of wartime barbarity occurred. The Japanese army swept into the ancient city of Nanking (what was then the capital of China), and within weeks, more than 300,000 Chinese civilians and soldiers were systematically raped, tortured, and murdered. In this seminal work, Iris Chang, whose own grandparents barely escaped the massacre, tells this history from three perspectives: that of the Japanese soldiers, that of the Chinese, and that of a group of Westerners who refused to abandon the city and created a safety zone, which saved almost 300,000 Chinese. Drawing on extensive interviews with survivors and documents brought to light for the first time, Iris Chang's classic book is the definitive history of this horrifying episode.

World War II on Film examines the war through the lens of 12 films. The movies selected include productions made during World War II and in each succeeding decade, providing a sense of how different generations perceive the war. World War II on Film provides a succinct yet well-grounded appraisal of that war as seen through 12 representative films. The book separates fact from fiction, showing where the movies were accurate and where they departed from reality, and places them in the larger context of historical and social events. Each movie chosen represents a particular aspect of the conflict, including the air war over Europe, the condition of prisoners of war, Nazi atrocities, and the British evacuation at Dunkirk. Unlike most histories of Hollywood during World War II or the genre of war movies, World War II on Film examines in depth the relation between the depictions of events, beliefs, attitudes, and ways of life as seen on film with reality as documented by historians or recorded by journalists or eye-witnesses to the war. The volume will appeal to high school and college readers, as well as general interest readers and film buffs.

War presents the most degraded moral environment humanity creates. It is an arena where individuality is subsumed in collective violence and humanity is obscured as a faceless, merciless enemy pitted against its reflection in an elemental struggle for survival. A barbaric logic has guided the conduct of war throughout history. Yet as Cathal Nolan reveals in this gripping, poignant, and powerful book, even as war can obliterate hope and decency at the grand level it simultaneously produces conditions that permit astonishing exceptions of mercy and shared dignity. Pulling the trigger is usually both the expedient thing and required by war's grim and remorseless calculus. Yet somehow the trigger is not always pulled. A different choice is made. Restraint triumphs. Humanity is rediscovered and honored in a flash of recognition. This book gathers and explores acts of singular mercy, giving them form and substance--across wars, causes, and opposing uniforms. These acts demand our attention not only for the moral uplift they supply but because they challenge assumptions about humanity itself. Rising above ordinary courage, they may ultimately transcend our understanding, entering the realm of the ineffable. Nevertheless, as Nolan shows, acts of mercy in war are not the provenance of saints but of ordinary men and women who perform them at great personal risk. As much or more than the normal war hero stories, we must recognize the extraordinary courage of the merciful in war. Mercy is an exceptional book about exceptions, challenging myths and heroic fabrications, refuting claims to exclusive moral virtue. It reminds us that decency in warfare is also universal, offering a haunting and compellingly humane counternarrative to war's usual inhumane logic.