Global Issues Forum: Fall 2010
featuring
Jere Van Dyk
"Captive: My Time as a Prisoner of the Taliban"
Wednesday, September 15
Reception - 5:30 PM * Speaking Event - 7:00 PM
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About the speaker: In the summer of 2007, Jere Van Dyk, a journalist working for CBS News, signed a contract with Times Books to write a book about the border areas of Afghanistan and Pakistan. In February 2008, six years after Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl was kidnapped by militants and beheaded, Van Dyk became the second American journalist to be kidnapped in Pakistan. CAPTIVE: My Time as a Prisoner of the Taliban (Times Books/Henry Holt and Company; on sale: June 22, 2010) is not the book Van Dyk was contracted to write but, rather, the chilling account of being captured and imprisoned by the Taliban for forty-five days, in the no-man’s-land between Afghanistan and Pakistan. This is the first time his story has been told.
CAPTIVE is Van Dyk’s searing account of his time 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 no one—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.
When Van Dyk went into the tribal area of Pakistan for the last time he was doing what he had done throughout his career, going into one of the most dangerous corners of the world to tell us a story we desperately need to know. This account of his harrowing journey makes good on his promise to offer readers an understanding of how the Taliban works, but it ultimately becomes a deeper tale of personal challenge and unforgettable human endurance.
Tickets for this event are on sale. This event is first in three-part series of Global Issues Forum in Fall 2010. Learn more about Fall 2010 Global Issues Forum events...
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