Washington Post Book Reviews
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Tuesday December 21, 2010
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A ROPE AND A PRAYER: A Kidnapping From Two Sides
David Rohde and Kristen Mulvihill
Viking
ISBN 978-0670022236
362 pages
$26.95
Reviewed by Philip Caputo
On a February morning in 1675, a Narragansett Indian war party attacked Lancaster, Mass., killed a number of townspeople, and took Mary Rowlandson and her three children hostage.
Held in harsh conditions for 11 weeks, she endured the death of her youngest daughter before she was ransomed. Seven years later, Rowlandson published "The Sovereignty and Goodness of God," an account of her ordeal that became a best-seller and launched a genre of American literature: the captivity narrative.
Dozens were published in the next 200 years. Most described the experiences of white settlers seized by Native Americans.
With the end of the Indian wars, these tales disappeared. But in the past 20 years, the genre has been revived by the rise of Islamist extremism and America's ever-deepening involvement in the Middle East and Central Asia. Nowadays, the victims are mostly journalists, diplomats and aid workers.
The latest addition to this literature is "A Rope and a Prayer," by New York Times correspondent David Rohde and his wife, Kristen Mulvihill. They tell their stories in alternating chapters, creating a harrowing narrative of two captivities. Rohde was abducted by Taliban insurgents in November 2008 and held for seven months. Mulvihill, who was photo editor for Cosmopolitan magazine in New York City, became a prisoner of her husband's imprisonment.
Rohde was on his way to interview a Taliban commander in the Afghan desert when he was seized along with his Afghan translator, Tahir Luddin, and his driver, Asad Mangal. The three men were shuttled from one village to another, then marched over the mountains into the lawless tribal areas of Pakistan and the clutches of a powerful terrorist outfit, the Haqqani network. They wound up in Miran Shah, a town in North Waziristan. As they later discovered, the commander, who bore the nom-de-guerre Abu Tayyeb, had lured them into a trap by inviting Rohde to interview him.
Rohde presents a rare, inside look at the Taliban and their world, a "giant insane asylum," an "alternate universe." The kidnappers stage videos of him and make impossible ransom demands, starting at $25 million; they repeatedly lie, promising that freedom is at hand one day, withdrawing the promises the next. Some of the guards are kind, some menacing. All are fanatically religious, each seeing himself as the defender of a faith under assault by a rich, predatory United States. They will believe any rumor, however false, that confirms their view, and disbelieve any fact that contradicts it. My personal favorite in this regard is one guard's conviction that the United States has deployed a secret weapon that sterilizes Muslim men.
As the weeks and months wear on, Rohde's emotions swing from hope to despair, from fear to anger and back again. He's guilt-ridden for risking his neck as a newly married man (he and Mulvihill had been married two months) and for dragging Luddin and Mangal into harm's way. He admits he should have shown better judgment; this isn't the first time he's been taken prisoner. Years before, while covering the conflict in Bosnia for the Christian Science Monitor, he was arrested by Serbian officials and held for 10 days. The siren call of the scoop seduced him into seeking the interview with Abu Tayyeb. "In Afghanistan, competitiveness and ambition had gotten the best of me," he writes. "I had lost my way."
While he languishes in Waziristan, his wife fights to gain his release, plunging into an experience worthy of a John le Carre thriller. She hires shadowy private operators who specialize in hostage negotiations, meets with FBI agents, pressures U.S. officials all the way up to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and special envoy Richard Holbrooke.
No less than her husband, she must summon reserves of patient courage and maintain her composure. Waiting for the kidnappers' latest demand, she finds herself a "captive to a call that might or might not come." When Abu Tayyeb contacts her by cell phone and tells her to call back at her own expense, she notes that the Taliban are cheapskates who "call collect."
Mulvihill's account is seasoned with such wry observations. Because Rohde's life depends on keeping the negotiations secret, she goes about her job as if nothing is amiss. The masquerade creates an absurd dissonance. In the morning, she's conferring with the FBI or some spooky go-between; in the afternoon, she's arranging photo shoots for salacious features like "What a Guy's Butt Says About Him." Her sense of ironic humor, her Roman Catholic faith, and the support of the couple's families help her stay sane.
But all efforts to free her husband and the other men fail. She is on her own, and so are they.
Mangal, the driver, appears to have joined the Taliban to save his life. Rohde and Luddin realize that there is only one way to save themselves. Before dawn on June 20, 2009, they throw a stolen rope over a wall and escape while their captors sleep.
They sneak through the streets of Miran Shah to a nearby Pakistani army base, where soldiers at first mistake them for suicide bombers and almost shoot them; but they talk their way onto the base and regain their freedom.
Thus the rope in the title. What of the prayer? Rohde, an agnostic when his captivity began, underwent a foxhole conversion, inspired partly by Luddin, whose Muslim faith provides "an example of religion as a positive force," as the Taliban exemplify religion at its worst.
Reunited with his wife, Rohde tells her, "Your God helped me through this experience." That statement isn't a ringing endorsement of the power of prayer, yet it sums up a spiritual journey that places this book in the tradition of early American captivity narratives like Rowlandson's. In those accounts, God shows his anger at waywardness through capture by uncivilized enemies and demonstrates his love and forgiveness through rescue and return. The captive is redeemed in all senses of the word.
There are differences, of course. Although Rohde doesn't flinch from showing his captors' cruelty, he doesn't demonize them.
And the sin for which he's punished isn't breaking a Biblical commandment, it's the excessive ambition that leads him to make a rash decision. Nevertheless, in the crisis of captivity, he realizes that belief in a higher power is not irrational.
My one quibble is with the book's style. Rohde, a two-time Pulitzer Prize winner, interrupts his tale with commentaries on Afghanistan's history and tribal customs, on U.S. policies and Pakistani intrigues. Readers will find these essays informative, but they may wish, as I did, that he had not rendered his personal story in the same objective, restrained prose. It reads too much like the series he wrote for the Times after his return to the United States. He tells us what his ordeal was like, but doesn't make us feel it. Mulvihill's writing appeals more directly to the heart. That said, this is an important and valuable story of love, faith, and courage.
Philip Caputo is the author of "A Rumor of War" and, most recently, "Crossovers," a novel.
Copyright 2010 Washington Post Writers Group
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TOP TEN BOOKS
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NONFICTION
"THE BIG SHORT: Inside the Doomsday Machine," by Michael Lewis (Norton, $27.95). "The Big Short" manages to give us the truest picture yet of what went wrong on Wall Street -- and why. At times, it reads like a morality play, at other times like a modern-day farce. -- Steven Pearlstein
"THE DEATH OF AMERICAN VIRTUE: Clinton vs. Starr," by Ken Gormley (Crown, $35). Gormley's signal contribution is his heroic evenhandedness. All but the most unregenerate partisans should deem this book fair. -- David Greenberg
"THE IMMORTAL LIFE OF HENRIETTA LACKS," by Rebecca Skloot (Crown, $26). A deftly crafted investigation of a social wrong committed by the medical establishment, as well as the scientific and medical miracles to which it led. -- Eric Roston
"JUST KIDS," by Patti Smith (Ecco, $27). This beautifully written memoir is a haunting elegy for Smith's soul mate Robert Mapplethorpe and a lost New York City. One of the best books ever written on becoming an artist. National Book Award winner. -- Elizabeth Hand
"THE TIGER: A True Story of Vengeance and Survival," by John Vaillant (Knopf, $26.95). This riveting story unfolds in the brutal cold of Russia's Boreal Forest where a tiger has killed a poacher. -- Sy Montgomery
FICTION
"FAITHFUL PLACE," by Tana French (Viking, $25.95). Two decades after he was supposed to elope with his childhood sweetheart, a Dublin detective learns that her body has been discovered where they used to meet. An elaborately twisted ballad of class resentments, family burdens and passion. -- Maureen Corrigan
"ROOM," by Emma Donoghue (Little Brown, $24.99). Using news reports as grim inspiration, Donoghue has invented the abduction of a 19-year-old college student who's been kept in a soundproof garden shed for seven years with her young son. --Ron Charles
"SUPER SAD TRUE LOVE STORY," by Gary Shteyngart (Random House, $26). This absurdist satire follows today's most ominous trend lines past Twitter and Facebook addiction to a post-literate, consumption-crazed America that abhors books, newspapers and even conversation. -- R.C.
"TO THE END OF THE LAND," by David Grossman (Knopf, $26.95). An Israeli woman flees her home to avoid learning of her soldier son's death. A desperate story that somehow does not cause despair, a book about death that stubbornly insists on life. -- Donna Rifkind
"A VISIT FROM THE GOON SQUAD," by Jennifer Egan (Knopf, $25.95). Every movement of this symphony of boomer life plays out through the modern music scene, a white-knuckle trajectory of cool, from punk to junk to whatever might lie beyond. --R.C.
Copyright 2010 Washington Post Writers Group
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A YEAR'S WORTH OF FAVORITES
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Reviewed by Jonathan Yardley
This year the fiction part of my personal selection of the year's best books is shorter than ever: only two novels, alas.
This reflects my disenchantment with what passes for American literary fiction these days, a subject upon which I've remarked in this space in the past, as well as the simple fact that over four-and-a-half decades of reviewing books I've found it more and more difficult to write about fiction in interesting or original ways. The temptation to lapse into formulaic writing is strong, and one way to resist it is just to review less fiction.
In any event, two novels stand out from the rather small pack that crossed my desk in 2010. One came as a surprise, the other met my expectations. The first, "In the Company of Angels" (Bloomsbury, $25), is by an American writer, Thomas E. Kennedy. A native New Yorker who is now in his 60s, Kennedy has lived in Copenhagen for many years and has published frequently in Denmark, but prior to the appearance here of this novel, the first of what he calls his "Copenhagen Quartet," little of his work had been published in the United States. What a pity, for he is a writer of real skill and sensitivity, telling the story of a Chilean who comes to Copenhagen to recover from torture at the hands of Augustin Pinochet's thugs and finds his life changed in unexpected ways.
Having greatly admired Olga Grushin's first novel, "The Dream Life of Sukhanov," and having included it in my favorites list for 2006, I was not surprised that her second, "The Line" (Putnam, $25.95), turned out to be every bit as good. Set in Moscow during what could be the mid-1950s, it draws upon "three different periods of Soviet history: the repression of Stalin's 1930s, the hopefulness of Khrushchev's Thaw (late 1950s-early 1960s), and the stagnation of Brezhnev's 1970s." It involves a few score people who queue daily in front of a mysterious kiosk where tickets may or may not be sold for a concert featuring a famous Russian composer long in self-exile, and who form a miniature society that becomes a microcosm of Russia itself.
As for nonfiction, we begin with three books about World War II. Remembering "Survival: Inside a Nazi Slave-Labor Camp" (Norton, $27.95), by Christopher R. Browning, describes life in Starachowice, a camp in central Poland where thousands of Jews were forced to work on behalf of the Nazi war machine. Browning, a leading scholar of the Holocaust, was drawn to the subject after reading about the acquittal in 1972 of an officer at the camp who clearly had been guilty of wartime atrocities.
Richard Overy, another distinguished historian of the wartime years, writes in "1939: Countdown to War" (Viking, $25.95) a brief, authoritative account of the few days in late summer 1939 when the fate of Europe hung in the balance.
He argues that war was not necessarily inevitable -- at least not at that precise time -- but that it was brought about by a combination of factors, among them Hitler's refusal to believe that England and France would honor their commitment to come to Poland's defense and the utter exhaustion of the leaders of all parties.
In "Berlin at War" (Basic, $29.95), Roger Moorhouse, a British writer of popular histories, describes life in the German capital from the confident and complacent (if also fearful) early months through the utter devastation ultimately wrought by Allied bombing and the ground attacks from east and west. Moorhouse is sympathetic to ordinary Berliners, especially as the bombing intensified and the city turned into an inferno, but he doesn't sentimentalize them.
Considerably more pleasant matters are the subject of "Country Driving" (Harper, $27.99), the third book about China by Peter Hessler, who covered that stupendous country for the New Yorker for much of the past decade. As readers of "River Town" and "Oracle Bones" are well aware, Hessler is remarkably observant and, when the occasion calls for it, exceedingly funny. He's at the top of his form in the opening section, in which he drives great distances on some of China's endless miles of new highways. His description of the Chinese driver's test is worth the price of admission, but there's more, including a visit to the little settlement outside Beijing where he spent much time for several years, and another to a booming new industrial city. Everywhere he goes, Hessler finds much to amuse and inform the reader.
"Saul Bellow: Letters" (Viking, $35), edited by Benjamin Taylor, is an imperfect collection because one senses that a lot of good correspondence is missing and because many of the letters included are essentially trivial, but so much here is first-rate that the book's shortcomings must be overlooked. The treasure includes an indignant letter to William Faulkner protesting his support for the release of the anti-Semitic Ezra Pound from St. Elizabeth's Hospital in Washington, D.C.; various letters to wives, ex-wives and lovers, in which the moods range from passion to fury; gossipy letters to Ralph Ellison and John Berryman.
Finally, six books about notable lives, three biographies and three memoirs. "Duke Ellington's America" (Univ. of Chicago, $40), by Harvey G. Cohen, is too long by perhaps 200 pages and at times drowns the reader in its author's copious research, but he has unearthed a staggering amount of material -- much of it at the Library of Congress -- and he uses it to bolster his argument that Ellington "mediated the tensions between popular and serious American art, intellectual and popular culture, creativity and conformity, democracy and communism, and especially between blacks and whites. Through his actions and his work over half a century, he changed American culture, transforming the nation's cultural and racial landscape."
Joseph Pulitzer is now known for the prizes that bear his name and not much else, yet as James McGrath Morris makes plain in "Pulitzer: A Life in Politics, Print and Power" (Harper, $29.99), he was one of the giants of American journalism. His circulation wars against William Randolph Hearst in New York City weren't pretty, and the decline into sensationalism of his beloved New York World was a great loss, but at his best he upheld high standards in St. Louis (where he got his start) and New York, and he doesn't deserve to be filed away with Hearst in the Yellow Press drawer.
An even better biography of an even more controversial giant of the press is Alan Brinkley's "The Publisher: Henry Luce and His American Century" (Knopf, $35). Co-founder and guiding light of what eventually became Time, Inc., Luce was revered and hated with equal passion for much of the 20th century, and through his hugely successful magazines had a profound influence not merely on how journalism is done but on the politics and ideology of his millions of readers.
John Julius Norwich is not as widely known in this country as he deserves to be, but in his more than 80 years he has become a prominent figure in Britain, where he writes well-received popular histories on a broad range of subjects and appears frequently on television as host of historical documentaries. His life, as described in his memoir "Trying to Please" (Axios, $20), has been full, accomplished and happy, and traveling with him through all those years is pure pleasure.
The remarkable writing career of Louis Auchincloss ended early this year with his death at the age of 92, but he has left a slender memoir, "A Voice from Old New York" (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, $25), as his last testament. It's a lovely book, utterly unapologetic about the old WASP New York where he lived his entire life but utterly illusion-free about it as well. He was always a much more complicated and interesting writer than his critics imagined -- they dismissed him as a "novelist of manners," with upper-class manners to boot -- and this elegantly written little book proves the point.
And then we have "Composed" (Viking, $26.95), by Rosanne Cash, who in her music and now in her memoir is entirely beyond category. The daughter of Johnny Cash by his first marriage, a composer and performer in her own right, Cash turns out to be a splendid prose stylist as well.
Her life hasn't been easy, and getting out from the huge shadow cast by her beloved but stupendously famous father -- not to mention that of her stepmother, June Carter Cash -- has been one of the harder parts of it, but she has lived to tell the tale and she does so with wit, grace and style. "Composed" is very close to perfect.
See you in January.
Jonathan Yardley can be reached at yardleyj(at symbol)washpost.com.
Copyright 2010 Washington Post Writers Group
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