Synopsis
Micah Garen and Marie-Helene Carleton were journalists and filmmakers working in Iraq on a documentary with their Iraqi translator Amir Doshi. In the late summer of 2004, they began to wrap up their work, and Marie-Helene returned home while Micah remained for a final two weeks of filming. As Micah and Amir were filming in a Nasiriyah market, something went horribly wrong: Micah was unmasked as a foreigner and kidnapped by militants in southern Iraq.
Home in New York, Marie-Helene awoke to a gut-wrenching phone call from Micah's mother with word of his abduction. She promised Micah's mother the impossible -- that together they would bring Micah back alive.
American Hostage is the remarkable memoir of Micah Garen's harrowing abduction and survival in captivity, as well as the heroic and successful struggle of Marie-Helene; along with family and friends to win Micah's and Amir's release from their captors. The world watched and waited as Micah's drama unfolded, but the...
Publishers Weekly
Moving and suspenseful, this account of a journalist's ordeal as a captive in Iraq recounts the machinations behind a delicate hostage situation. Documentary filmmakers Garen and Carleton went to Iraq in 2003 to investigate reports of looting at archeological sites. Near the end of their project, Carleton returned to New York City, leaving Garen to complete the final stages of filming in the southern city of Nasiriyah. Everything seemed to be wrapping up smoothly until, two days before his scheduled return to America, Garen was identified as a foreigner in a crowded marketplace, and he and his Iraqi translator were kidnapped by a local Shi'ite group. Garen's first-person account of their time in captivity alternates chapters with Carleton's story of how friends and family rallied at home and abroad to jump-start a rescue effort, even before the FBI got on the case. Carleton details the effort's minute-by-minute reversals and its many risky decisions in crisp, straightforward prose that will soon have readers commiserating with her highs and lows. For his part, Garen recalls his fear, anger and confusion with clarity and immediacy, never demonizing his captors yet never condoning their acts. One of the book's great pleasures is the description of his friendship with his translator, Amir, an educated, secular Muslim. Even readers who followed the story in the newspapers will find much that is new since so many of the crucial negotiations happened off the front page. And with a romantic subplot humming through the tension, this story is made for the silver screen. Agent, Richard Abate. (Oct.) Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.