Story Description:
Scribner|September
10, 2013|Advanced Reader’s Edition||ISBN: 978-1-4516-4560-6
The spectacularly
dramatic memoir of a woman whose curiosity about the world led her from rural
Canada to imperiled and dangerous countries on every continent and then into
fifteen months of harrowing captivity in Somalia – a story of courage,
resilience, and extraordinary grace.
At the age of
eighteen, Amanda Lindhout moved from her hardscrabble Alberta hometown to the
big city – Calgary – and worked as a cocktail waitress, saving her tips so she
could travel the globe. As a child, she
escaped a violent household by paging through National Geographic and imagining
herself in its exotic locales. Now she
would see those places for real. She
backpacked through Latin America, Laos, Bangladesh, and India, and emboldened
by each experience, went on to travel solo across Sudan, Syria, and Pakistan. In war-ridden Afghanistan and Iraq she carved
out a fledgling career as a TV reporter.
And then in August 2008, she traveled to Mogadishu, Somalia – “the most
dangerous place on earth” – to report on the fighting there. On her fourth day in the country, she and her
photojournalist companion were abducted.
An astoundingly
intimate and harrowing account of Lindhout’s fifteen months as a captive, A House in the Sky illuminates the
psychology, motivations, and desperate extremism of her young guards and the
men in charge of them. She is kept in
chains nearly starved, and subjected to
unthinkable abuse. She survives
by imaging herself in a “house in the sky,” looking down at the woman shackled
below, and finding strength and hope in the power of her own mind. Lindhourt’s decision, upon her release, to
counter the violence he endured by founding an organization to help the Somali
people rebuild their country through education is a wrenching testament to the
capacity of the human spirit and an astonishing portrait of the power of
compassion and forgiveness.
My Review:
If you read the
above ‘Story Description’ you’ll have an exact idea of what this wonderful
memoir is about. I only want to add that
Amanda Lindhout has to be one of the most courageous women I’ve read about in a
long time. The unspeakable abuse she
endured day after day for fifteen long months is truly harrowing. To be trussed up like an animal and suspended
from a ceiling for forty-eight hours at a time is totally unfathomable to me
but she somehow survived by escaping to her “house in the sky” where she
watched the woman below her being tortured.
One of the guards
was particularly gruelling in his abuse and punishment and raped her on an
almost daily basis and how she ever endured that I’ll never know, regardless of
her ‘house in the sky.’ She had to
separate her physical self from her emotional self in order to deal with the
horrifying things that were happening to her and they were brutish and inhumane
in every way conceivable. I cried while
reading several passages in this book and my heart went out to this young woman
who showed such strength and resilience in the face of such brutality.
Although she
suffered unbearable abuse and torture, she still had the passion and compassion
at the end of this horrendous journey to set up educational help to aid Somalia
in reordering their country. It takes a
very, very special person to be able to do that.
This book affected
me on so many levels, emotionally and spiritually mostly. I honestly and sincerely don’t believe I
could ever have survived what this young woman did. I would have died in captivity long before
the fifteen months was up. Amanda, you
are a true testament to what the human body can withstand and a true testament
for other woman to show strength and courage in the face of such horrible
adversity. I am so very sorry for what
happened to you and thank you for having the courage to share your most intimate
story with us. I don’t think I’ll ever
forget you and your story.
Thank you to
GoodReads for sending me a copy of this book which I won in their contest. I wouldn’t have wanted to miss this book for
the world and will be keeping it as part of my permanent collection.
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