- Used Book in Good Condition.
An Amazon Best Book of the Month, September 2013: Amanda
Lindhout’s story starts as a breathless travelogue, inspired by
National Geographic: as a kid in rural Alberta, Lindhout
scavenged bottles to buy thrift store copies of the magazine,
escaping through its pages from a violent home into a vast,
vibrant world. In her twenties, she sought out every amazing
place she’d always wanted to see, then kept going, loving the
rush of pushing beyond the next border. Travel became her
education, and a desire to make it her vocation as a freelance
journalist draws her to Afghanistan, Iraq, and finally Somalia,
where a hungry young reporter with guts might make a name for
herself. Lindhout’s hubris can be frustrating: intellectually,
she knows Somalia is the “most dangerous country on earth,” but
she still talks her former lover, freelance photojournalist Nigel
Brennan, into coming along. By this time, both of them have moved
through so many unpredictable places unscathed that the
possibility of real peril is a hazy abstraction, and their
abduction by armed extremists comes as a shock. As their captors
hold out for a ransom of $1.5 million, Lindhout and Brennan
defensively convert to Islam and try to remain sane through
covert communication, but after a botched escape, Lindhout
endures severe torture and repeated rape--and survival means
drawing on her every reserve. Written with uncommon sensitivity
(by Lindhout and cowriter Sara Corbett), A House in the Sky
becomes a moving testament to her ability to cultivate resilience
and a kind of spiritual transcendence, even in profound darkness.
Witnessing her experience left profoundly grateful for everything
I have, more sharply aware of how I choose to react to
circumstances beyond my control. Most of us will never live a day
like the 460 Lindhout spent in captivity, but we all have our
trials, and we can cultivate our own resilience. --Mari Malcolm
Guest Review of A House in the Sky
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By Susan Casey, author of The Wave: In Pursuit of the Rogues,
Freaks, and Giants of the Ocean
Growing up in the small town of Red Deer, Alberta, Amanda
Lindhout dreamed big. She was a young girl with a curious streak
the size of the Rockies, and though her wrong-side-of-the-tracks
provenance seemed to promise only a flatline future, Lindhout
decided to change her own e. Out there, she knew, beyond a
horizon dotted with oil rigs and trailer parks, magic awaited, a
vast filled with all things "lost or unexplored, mystical or
wild."
How did Lindhout know this? National Geographic. Paging through
worn copies of the magazine, she was transported to every
spectacular place she’d never been: “The world arrived in waves
and flashes, as a silvery tide sweeping over a promenade in
Havana or the glinting snowfields of Annapurna. The world was a
tribe of pygmy archers in the Congo and the green geometry of
Kyoto’s tea gardens. It was a yellow-sailed catamaran in a choppy
Arctic Sea."
And so, fueled by waitressing wages and determination,
Lindhout’s travels begin, at first in idyllic ways, then
accelerating and acquiring a degree of difficulty that would
daunt any seasoned explorer. In short order, Lindhout—working as
a freelance journalist—ventures into places like Kabul and
Baghdad, Addis Ababa, the back alleys of Cairo, and then,
finally, Somalia, where the stakes become nothing less than life
or death.
Lindhout’s story is exhilarating and harrowing and several other
brands of extreme, and it would be riveting however it was told.
But in A House in the Sky, readers will find a rare and beautiful
alchemy: writer Sara Corbett captures Lindhout’s voice and spirit
with utter mastery on the page, and a kind of ferocious grace
that I found breathtaking.
I know that’s a strange phrase, ferocious grace. Lindhout’s
desire—her need, even—to live on all cylinders burns bright in
this book, but Corbett deftly reminds us that even when chipping
away at cement, “covered in grit and cobwebs,” while attempting a
desperate escape from her prison, Lindhout is still that
unassuming and hopeful girl from Red Deer, Alberta. The one who
wrote to her mother from India, “I am going to Jodhpur. It is a
city in the desert, called the Blue City, as all the buildings
are painted blue! I am having the BEST TIME EVER!”
In fact, it’s Lindhout’s contradictions that make her such a
rich character. She can be naïve and driven, generous and
rtunistic, ambitious and fitful, sometimes all at once. At
the same time she’s heading for danger, she’s making friends. And
even after she is taken hostage by an extremist group, and her
situation descends into darkness, she finds small measures of
beauty and even optimism in her captivity. And within that
simple, brutal paradox, Lindhout manages to stay alive.
What Lindhout endured during her 460 days in captivity is
difficult to absorb, but Corbett is brilliant with the telling
detail, and her writing is so strong that she can paint readers a
vivid picture with only a few brush strokes.
A House in the Sky is a true story of a young woman’s radical
adventures. It is absorbing and inspiring and textured. It is
terrifying. It illuminates. It is the best book I have read in a
very long time.