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Posted 20 hours ago

An Evil Cradling

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Brian was kidnapped and incarcerated in Beirut and over more than 4 years moved to various hiding places. The 103 third parties who use cookies on this service do so for their purposes of displaying and measuring personalized ads, generating audience insights, and developing and improving products. Considering that he spent several years in a series of rooms, he does well to make the experience interesting and compelling. Keenan's recognition that his guards were in their own, psychological, prisons was what allowed him to overcome his ordeal. I couldn't bear to part with my book, even to lend it to someone, so I bought another as a gift for one of my daughter's-in-law.

The first section, on his time in solitude, has some absolutely amazing passages, that evoked a stronger emotional response in me than anything else I have ever read. There were certain areas where I do think that he wrote in excess, and could have benefited from being more direct. Afterwards he accepted a teaching position at the American University of Beirut, where he worked for about four months. These were not two-dimensional villains, but humans with desperate, misguided hopes and sinister, obsessive fears. A stubborn character, a fully paid-up member of the Awkward Squad, he exhibited an incredible strength of character that saw him through nearly 5 years of horror.From the beginning, Keenan states that he is writing this book as part of his healing, and is presenting the facts not as a chronological record but as an attempt to capture the subjective experience of what it was like to go through his ordeal.

I'll start by saying that I started reading this book after I saw a Facebook comment claiming this is good literature. Instead I found myself compulsively reading every moment I could, determined to finish this incredible book before the meeting, and not wanting to miss a word. I don’t think the book or their relationship could wear that - but without it, there’s something missing. The hills that Keenan was recruiting his friends to die on with him were simply not worth it, but thankfully he worked this out for himself. Beautiful section on the ‘dreaming man’, the ‘living corpses’ ends with: ‘a man emerges back into life, not because of anything I have said, but the lunacy and the laughter that is at the heart of our life beckon him back and he cannot resist.His sisters were flown by Irish military executive jet to Damascus to meet him and bring him home to Northern Ireland. We were convinced by the conditions we were kept in and the life we managed to lead that if there was a god that for was above all else a comedian. Yet I didn’t hold back from reading; the descriptions somehow manage to stimulate the imagination while avoiding any goriness; they are harrowing at times, but never gratuitous.

Because he was travelling on both Irish and British passports, the Irish government made numerous diplomatic representations for his release, working closely with the Iranian government. After all, he had come from Ireland, at a time where there was significant unrest and political violence.Writing with such focus on self-reflection and reprocessing of events is less interesting to me than straightforward fact. I recently read a book,El Narco: Inside Mexico's Criminal Insurgency,which mentioned the solitary confinement which prisoners are subjected to in US prisons,frankly it sounded barbaric.

I struggled reading this book because it was very interesting at times but then it became very dull. Most of the narrative was about a certain period of his imprisonment and I felt the final months were just glossed over and it ended quite abruptly. This book is an inspiration; I so admired Brian for his determination and humanity throughout and I still do. This is a memoir of his four and a half years as a hostage, enduring torture, beatings, and solitary confinement. This book is at times almost unbearable to read, it brilliantly relates the static conditions of his captivity and the awful odyssey of his mind, how even the entry of an orange into their monotone world is a remarkable object of colour and beauty.

Please include what you were doing when this page came up and the Cloudflare Ray ID found at the bottom of this page. A true philosopher with the capacity to honestly and unflinchingly look fallen man, the human shadow, in the face, within and without, in all it's ignorance, fear and brutality and over come it with faith, truth, dignity, humour and reason and in doing so, again akin to Primo Levi, he discovers himself; he is humanised, ennobled and empowered through the process.

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