Captive: My Time as a Prisoner of the Taliban [FIRST EDITION, FIRST PRINTING]

Van Dyk, Jere

Published by Times Books / Henry Holt and Company, New York, 2010

About this Item

As new condition black boards with silver spine lettering contained in an as new condition non price-clipped color photographic dust jacket. Includes Dedication; Author's Note; Prologue; Author's Endnote; Acknowledgments; and Index. Illustrated with a frontispiece map. " An American reporter's chilling account of being kidnapped and imprisoned by the Taliban, in the no-man's-land between Afghanistan and Pakistan. In the summer of 2007, Jere Van Dyk, a journalist working with CBS News, arrived in Kabul, Afghanistan. Few reporters knew the region as he did: he had first gone to Afghanistan as a young man in the 1970s, and he traveled extensively with the mujahideen in the early 1980s as they fought against the Soviet Union. He was back this time to begin research on a book about the borderlands, particularly the tribal areas of northwest Pakistan, which no Western reporters had been able to penetrate for years. The Taliban was reconstituting itself in that region, and al-Qaeda leaders - including Osama bin Laden - were said to be in hiding there as well. Van Dyk was determined to cross the border, one way or another, to get the story. Six months later, in mid-February 2008, Van Dyk was on his way. He and three Afghan guides had crossed into the tribal areas, hoping to reach the home of a local chieftain by nightfall. But then a dozen armed men in black turbans appeared over the crest of a hill. It was the Taliban, and he was now their prisoner. Captive is Van Dyk's searing account of his forty-five days in a Taliban prison, and it is gripping and terrifying in the tradition of the best prison literature. The main action takes place in a single room, cut off from the outside world, where Van Dyk feels he can trust nobody - not his jailers, not his guides (who he fears may have betrayed him), and certainly not the charismatic Taliban leader whose fleeting appearances carry the hope of redemption as well as the prospect of immediate, violent death. Van Dyk went to the tribal areas to investigate the challenges facing America there. His story is of a deeper, more personal challenges, an unforgettable tale of human endurance." - from the inner front and rear jacket flaps. Seller Inventory # 003278

Bibliographic Details

Title: Captive: My Time as a Prisoner of the ...

Publisher: Times Books / Henry Holt and Company, New York

Publication Date: 2010

Binding: Hardcover

Condition: As New

Dust Jacket Condition: As New

Edition: 1st Edition