The Hostage's Daughter - Sulome Anderson - Hardcover The Hostage's Daughter Author Info About the Book In this gripping blend of reportage, memoir, and analysis, a journalist and daughter of one of the world’s most famous hostages, Terry Anderson, takes an intimate look at her father’s captivity during the Lebanese Hostage Crisis and the ensuing political firestorm on both her family and the United States—as well as the far-reaching implications of those events on Middle Eastern politics today. In 1991, six-year-old Sulome Anderson met her father, Terry, for the first time. While working as the Middle East bureau chief for the Associated Press covering the long and bloody civil war in Lebanon, Terry had been kidnapped in Beirut and held for her entire life by a Shiite Muslim militia associated with the Hezbollah movement. As the nation celebrated, the media captured a smiling Anderson family joyously reunited. But the truth was far darker. Plagued by PTSD, Terry was a moody, aloof, and distant figure to the young daughter who had long dreamed of his return—and while she smiled for the cameras all the same, she absorbed his trauma as her own.

Years later, after long battles with drug abuse and mental illness, Sulome would travel to the Middle East as a reporter, seeking to understand her father, the men who had kidnapped him, and ultimately, herself. What she discovered was shocking—not just about Terry, but about the international political machinations that occurred during the years of his captivity. The Hostage’s Daughter is an intimate look at the effect of the Lebanese Hostage Crisis on Anderson’s family, the United States, and the Middle East today. Sulome tells moving stories from her experiences as a reporter in the region and challenges our understanding of global politics, the forces that spawn terrorism and especially Lebanon, the beautiful, devastated, and vitally important country she came to love. Powerful and eye-opening The Hostage’s Daughter is essential reading for anyone interested in international relations, this violent, haunted region, and America's role in its fate. I'm a Librarian Critical Praise “[A] heart-felt, moving . . .

examination of a greatly changed Middle East and the groups that benefited from their hostage taking and other terrorist activities, but are far from atoning for them.” — Rod Nordland, international correspondent at large, The New York Times and author of The Lovers “Deeply personal and brutally frank . . . powerfully demonstrates that suffering need not destroy.” — Terry Waite CBE, President of Hostage UK and author of Taken on Trust “A gutsy coming-of-age memoir, beautifully written, and always provocative. From wounded adolescence to fearless investigative reporter, Sulome Anderson confronts her father’s kidnappers-and along the way, she shines a harsh light on the murky world of intelligence in a distraught Middle East. A poignant and astonishing mystery story.” — Kai Bird, Pulitzer Prize-winning historian and author of The Good Spy: The Life and Death of Robert Ames A remarkable personal story as well as penetrating insight into the adamantine world of the Middle East, where truth and politics are irreconcilable.

— Brian Keenan, former hostage and author of An Evil Cradling “An excellent piece of reportage from someone who clearly has an intimate understanding of the Middle East, interwoven with an equally gripping and emotional account of one woman’s quest for reason and forgiveness. This is the story that few journalists have the bravery to write about others, let alone themselves.” — Reza Azlan, author of Zealot [Sulome’s] brutally candid, fiercely intelligent, and beautifully crafted memoir is both a fascinating introduction to the shadow world of Middle East intrigue and an inspiring story of resilience and recovery.” — Stephen M. Walt, coauthor of The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy “There are times when you want to look away. This book is that personal. By telling the story of the author-and her famous family-it also traces the story of terrorism in the modern era, in gripping and intimate ways.” — Brian Williams, MSNBC “A perilous and riveting spiral into Middle Eastern politics, exploring the dawn of the terrorist era in Beirut . . .

Anderson creates a compelling depiction of the collateral damage of terrorism and a remarkable piece of investigative journalism with a surprise twist.” — Publishers Weekly “Anderson is at her best when she teases apart the narrative’s many threads, which number not just Hezbollah, but also the broader community of Shiite Islam, to say nothing of Israeli intelligence, the CIA, Iran, and other actors in set pieces such as the Beirut embassy bombing.” — Kirkus Product Details Trimsize: 6 in (w) x 9 in (h) x 0.97 in (d) Pages: 288 BISAC1: BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY / Personal Memoirs BISAC2: POLITICAL SCIENCE / World / Middle Eastern An Evil Cradling: Amazon.co.uk: Brian Keenan: 8601404428067: Books An Evil Cradling Add all three to Basket Some of these items are dispatched sooner than the others. Show details Buy the selected items together This item:An Evil Cradling by Brian Keenan Paperback Â£9.98 Only 14 left in stock (more on the way). Sent from and sold by Amazon.

FREE Delivery on orders over Â£10. Details Some Other Rainbow by John McCarthy Paperback Â£12.99 Sent from and sold by Amazon. FREE Delivery in the UK. Details Between Extremes: A Journey Beyond Imagination by Brian Keenan Paperback Â£8.99 Only 3 left in stock (more on the way). Sent from and sold by Amazon. FREE Delivery on orders over Â£10. Details Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought Page 1 of 1 Start over Page 1 of 1 This shopping feature will continue to load items. In order to navigate out of this carousel please use your heading shortcut key to navigate to the next or previous heading. Enter your mobile number or email address below and we'll send you a link to download the free Kindle App. Then you can start reading Kindle books on your smartphone, tablet, or computer - no Kindle device required. Apple To get the free app, enter your mobile phone number. or Don't have a Kindle? Get your Kindle here , or download a FREE Kindle Reading App .

Product details Publisher: Vintage; New Ed edition (15 April 1993) Language: English Product Dimensions: 12.9 x 2.2 x 19.8 cm Average Customer Review: Review "Incredibly moving." (Gina McKee Daily Express) "An early nineties classic... It reminds you of the privilege of freedom" (Joseph Fiennes Daily Express) "There may have been more important books than Brian Keenan's An Evil Cradling, but its thoughtfulness and delicacy of feeling are unforgettable. Four years of savage captivity in Lebanon have been transmuted into understanding, not bitterness: a remarkable achievement" (Daily Telegraph) "From the horror has come something wonderful. An Evil Cradling is a great book... it has been created from harsh reality, and it has been created by a true writer... With the publication of An Evil Cradling, Brian Keenan is not letting the world forget.

This is a mighty achievement by a magnificent writer" (Frank McGuinness Irish Times) "Scriptural in its resonances and its broad artistry, while being as gripping as an airport thriller" (Observer) Book Description Best Sellers In Chains Best Sellers In Chains News One of the first things Terry Anderson was asked after he emerged from almost seven years of captivity in Lebanon was whether he planned to write a book. "Now, there's an ideal" he said with a mischievous grin. And he has lost no time; the memoir, "Den of Lions," will go on sale next October, less than two years after his release. But his former cellmates, not surprisingly, had the same idea. British hostages Brian Keenan and John McCarthy both have new books on the market; Terry Waite's will be published the month before Anderson's. And outsiders are horning in on the action: "Someone Who'll Watch Over Me," a hostage drama that opened in London, is a hit on Broadway. How much of this genre can even a sympathetic public take? Plenty, publishers bet. Advances to the authors total more than $1 million; newspapers and magazines are spending thousands more on serial rights.

(NEWSWEEK will excerpt "Den of Lions.") So far, that confidence seems justified. In England, both Keenan's and McCarthy's books are best sellers, despite the fact that the two spent four years chained up within a few feet of each other. Indeed, the remarkably different books have only built interest in each other-proving, as Keenan notes, that "each man experienced his imprisonment in his own way." Keenan's poetic "An Evil Cradling," which he describes as a literary attempt to "imprison" insanity on paper in the same way he held it at bay while in captivity, topped The Sunday Times of London's bestseller list for nine weeks last year. When the more down-to-earth "Some Other Rainbow," by McCarthy and girlfriend Jill Morrell, debuted last month as Britain's No. 1 hardback, "An Evil Cradling" reigned as the top-selling paperback and quickly moved back up the hardback list. "Jill and John have had a tremendous knock-on effect," says Keenan's publicist, Alex Hippisley-Cox. "The hostage thing is back on." Try Newsweek for only $1.25 per week Clearly, love stories provide some of the commercial magic.

McCarthy and Morrell thrilled an adoring public with their recent engagement. "I've never seen a book signing where half the people cry and the rest bring presents," says bookstore staffer Matthew Frost. Keenan, who writes movingly of being in love, quietly married his physiotherapist last week in Dublin. The stories of the women who waited help distinguish the narratives. Morrell's account of the Foreign Office's coldness to her as she attempted to organize the "Friends of John McCarthy" has outraged Britons. Anderson's book, too, will include chapters from his wife, Madeleine, to serve as a counterpoint to his hostage narrative. The books' main drama, though, is in the human will to survive. "People who have gone through the hostage experience are modern prophets," says Anthony Grey, who wrote "Hostage in Peking" after two years of solitary confinement. McCarthy hides behind a sense of the absurd; he and Keenan dub one jail "The House of Fun." Anderson examines his Roman Catholic faith. "Hate the sin, love the sinner," he writes of his early efforts to cope with his rage at his captors.

"[But] how can you separate a person from his actions?" The prisoners sometimes clashed, but more often they helped each other through the bad times. Undoubtedly they will relish their reunions-on the new author circuit. Former hostage Keenan visits Beirut for 'another holiday' | Media | The Guardian Former hostage Keenan visits Beirut for 'another holiday' · After 17 years, author to film documentary about ordeal · He feels no hatred towards captors despite ordeal Former hostage Keenan visits Beirut for 'another holiday' · After 17 years, author to film documentary about ordeal · He feels no hatred towards captors despite ordeal Wednesday 15 August 2007 06.46 EDT First published on Wednesday 15 August 2007 06.46 EDT Share on Messenger Close Brian Keenan, the Belfast-born lecturer who was imprisoned and tortured for four and a half years by Shia militants, has returned to Lebanon to film a documentary about his experience. Seventeen years after being released, the former hostage has revisited the suburbs of Beirut where he was abducted at the height of the country's destructive civil war.

The 56-year-old, who wrote a bestselling book, An Evil Cradling, about his captivity, gave a public reading and talk in the Lebanese capital about his ordeal. Keenan was seized by Islamic Jihad gunmen on his way to his teaching job at the American University in Beirut in April 1986. Initially he was held in isolation and later moved to a series of underground dungeons where he was chained alongside another hostage, the British journalist John McCarthy. At his reading in Beirut last weekend, Keenan recalled the violence he had endured at the hands of his captors. "I often refer to my captivity as a holiday. I'm back for another holiday because I thought Lebanon owed me one," the Irish Times reported him as saying. "I was nine months on my own in a tiny frigging little cell. The food was slid under the door, I was taken out for 10 minutes a day to go to the toilet and put back in again." One of his captors, Keenan remarked, had been a cruel and psychotic man who took pleasure in inflicting pain.

"If I had the capacity I would have slit his throat and smiled while doing it." But he insisted he bore no animosity towards those who had imprisoned him or towards the Lebanese people. "I don't want revenge, an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth leaves everybody blind and unable to speak." He had been due to visit Lebanon last year but the trip was postponed after the outbreak in summer of the Israel-Hizbullah war. Keenan's wife, Audrey, and his two sons, Cal and Jack, accompanied him on his three-week tour. The documentary is being made for BBC television. Earlier this year Keenan had been active supporting calls for the freeing of the kidnapped BBC journalist Alan Johnston who was held hostage by an Islamist group in Gaza.

He described in the Guardian the final "unreality of freedom" after "having spent months in a small room, most likely in the dark, having only the use of a radio for the intellectual stimulation that holds back your other companions for a short time - those being panic, anxiety, and fear so intense that you feel yourself suffocating, and you cannot do a thing about it." · To contact the MediaGuardian newsdesk email editor@mediatheguardian.com or phone 020 7239 9857. For all other inquiries please call the main Guardian switchboard on 020 7278 2332. · If you are writing a comment for publication, please mark clearly "for publication". Life is sweet for Brian Keenan | Life and style | The Guardian Life and style Life is sweet for Brian Keenan As a hostage in Beirut, Brian Keenan knew that if he didn't survive his biggest regret would be not having children.

But 20 years on, the life he has with his wife and sons is the perfect antidote to the hell of four years in captivity Brian Keenan with his sons Cal (left) and Jack (right) Photograph: Patrick Bolger Friday 11 September 2009 19.05 EDT First published on Friday 11 September 2009 19.05 EDT Share on Messenger Close It was as a hostage in Beirut, facing the possibility that he might be executed at any moment, that Brian Keenan realised how much being a father would mean to him. "I remember thinking, if I'm going to die here, my biggest regret is that I haven't had any kids," he says. "The feeling quite overwhelmed me." Back then, as he and fellow hostage John McCarthy sat chained to a wall, half-starved, or were wrapped in sticky-tape and bundled into car boots, Keenan couldn't in his wildest dreams have foreseen how his life would pan out two decades on.

Because today, with autumn starting to nip around Dublin Bay, Keenan is standing in his handsome, book-lined drawing room, stoking a roaring fire and doing a more than passable impression of a prosperous country gentleman. When the door opens and his wife, Audrey, 45, appears with coffee and perfect Irish scones, the idyll is almost complete. When it opens again and two good-looking sons – Jack, 11, and Cal, nine – put their heads round to say hello politely, you realise he really did hit the jackpot. Keenan admits that there are times when he looks at his picture-perfect family and can't believe life is this good. "They'll be sitting there on the sofa opposite me, watching the television, and I see them and I think, how did I get all this?" During just over four years of captivity – from April 1986 to August 1990 – he wouldn't, couldn't, focus on what might happen if he ever got out. "I remember thinking, this is where I am and I might be here for a long time – I might never get out.

And thinking about the outside, about what might be going on and about a new life in the future, would have made it too difficult. Other hostages survived by thinking like that, by thinking outside their confinement, but I didn't." When he was finally released, Keenan famously told journalists that he intended to "make love to every woman in the world", before realising that imprisonment had left him horribly vulnerable and that he should steer clear of a big love affair. Then, having decided after all not to leap into the arms of the first woman who crossed his newly liberated path, he ended up doing precisely that: Audrey Doyle, who became his wife in 1993, was the physiotherapist charged with helping to build up his muscles again. "We were just friends for a long time, before it led to anything else," says Audrey. "All the same, some people thought I'd just emerged from nowhere and predicted it would never last." Sixteen years on, it's hard to believe anyone could have been pessimistic about their union: Audrey – warm-hearted, easy-going, open – is the perfect foil for the edgy, angst-ridden, complicated Keenan.

Once, when she was still his physiotherapist and he her patient, she committed a faux-pas by tying his leg to a gym bar, forgetting there would be connotations for a man who had been shackled so long. When she realised what she had done, she says, she "went outside and laughed and laughed". Today, as Keenan embarks on one of his serious, soul-searching stories, she interjects with perfectly pitched asides that manage to be both playful and respectful, and you sense that Keenan is immensely grateful for the sheer fun his wife has managed to inject into an existence that could easily have gone on being tortured long after his physical release. In fact, an ordinary life bringing up children is, Keenan admits, the perfect antidote to four years of hellish captivity in Beirut. "Having kids is all about the here and now; there's no time to focus on the past." He doesn't want, he says, to be defined by his hostage years. "The years I was locked up were an incident in my personal history. They're not all of me." Yet for so many people those four years do define him, and will go on defining him. That is another reason family life is so precious.

"My children," he says, "are among the few people in the world who don't think of me as an ex-hostage." Jack and Cal don't know much about their dad's life before they came along but, from his point of view, becoming a father in his 40s has obviously been fundamental to the new life Keenan, now 58, has forged for himself. After all those years spent living in his own head, forensically dissecting his own psychological makeup and then describing it, brilliantly and powerfully, in his bestselling book An Evil Cradling , he lives now in ordinary-dad mode, and is grateful that thoughts about paying the mortgage, helping his boys with their homework and what to make them for tea now take centre-stage in his mind. But when he allows his brain to wander, one of the things he is most struck by is the difference between the childhood his sons are having and his own. It was at least in part because he wanted to describe that difference for them that he decided to write about his own boyhood in Protestant east Belfast.

Like An Evil Cradling, the new book is lyrical in parts, drawing on a depth of emotion that seems all the more raw and honest because it contrasts so radically with the picture he paints of his parents' unwillingness, or inability, to indulge in the self-reflection at which their son has become a master. But it's the nuts and bolts of his early life, in a working-class neighbourhood in the 1950s, that strike you most forcefully. Keenan exquisitely describes the contrast between the exotic street names – his own was Evolina Street, next along was Syringa Street – and the ordinariness of life for its cash-strapped, often work-starved, inhabitants. His dad, who had been given up for dead after a plane crash in Africa while serving in the RAF during the war, later marrying his mother in a church in which his name had been carved prematurely on a war memorial, settled into life as a bus conductor and then a telephone engineer without complaint, never leaving the house without his cap and "singing in the morning as he stood in his vest and trousers at the kitchen sink sloshing handfuls of soapy water into his face".

Keenan remembers that his Sunday afternoon task was to cut up newspapers into six-inch squares as toilet paper for the outside loo. His mother, meanwhile, was at the heart of a street-centred community. In Evolina Street, no one locked the front door, even at night; other women came and went without knocking, simply blustering into one another's back rooms as if they were in their own homes. When Keenan was born, girls from the street were chosen to help Brenda, his older sister, take him for walks and look after him. "Had I not had any sisters, the mothers of the street would have selected two of their own daughters for the job. In a very real sense the street was your family," he writes. That existence is light years from the spacious, comfortable, middle-class Dublin house in which Keenan is bringing up his own children (it even has electronic security gates) and one can only imagine the surprise with which it will eventually be read by Jack and Cal. All the same, though, their father's childhood isn't entirely another country: the values instilled in Evolina Street, says Keenan, are still the values he lives by and wants to pass on to his sons.

"My parents taught me to never just accept anything," he says. "To question everything, that was the spirit they instilled in me." Audrey, beside him on the sofa, laughs happily. "And oh, my God, did our kids inherit that!" Keenan's parents are both dead – his father's death was pivotal in his decision to go to Beirut. It was as he carried his father's coffin that he made the decision to leave Belfast, and to seek a new life overseas as a teacher at the American University in Beirut. At the time of the kidnap he was wearing one of his father's shirts, and that connection was a crumb of comfort to him – in An Evil Cradling, he writes movingly about how his dad became "not simply a memory but … a real presence … a presence I could feel more than see, a comforting reassurance that eased the hurt into a deeply filled sadness, yet that same sadness as it became reflective, lifted me". His mother died in 2004 having survived his captivity – something she rarely spoke about, Keenan says. "It was her way," he explains. "When I came home she didn't ask, and I didn't tell much at all.

My sisters told me that when I was away she didn't speak much about what was happening. When there were rumours that I might be coming home, though, she knitted me a sweater." She was always a great one for knitting, he says – in a way she both interpreted and dealt with the world through her clacking knitting needles. In the new book, Keenan describes his mother's decline through Alzheimer's – and yet it wasn't entirely a decline, as he points out, because it seemed to take her back to a time and a place where she had been happiest: the world of her youth. It was a world her son had known nothing about – there was no memoir for him to read, as there will be for Jack and Cal – so he found, paradoxically, that what doctors might have labelled the confusion of his mother's old-age ramblings brought a clarity about his family's past that he had given up hope of ever hearing about. Against the odds, Alzheimer's seems to have strengthened Keenan's bond with his mother; even as she lay dying, having outstripped the doctors' expectations of how long she might survive, he felt she was asserting her independence of spirit one final time.

It is clear that Keenan is as proud of his mother as she surely was, quietly, of him. "She knitted me a sweater," he says simply. "I've written her a book." There were also his sisters: Brenda and Elaine – the former his elder by eight years, the latter his younger by 10 – achieved global fame as they battled, through his captivity, to keep his plight in the public eye. Was he surprised by what they had done when he was released? "I was amazed – I had no idea about the campaign," he says. Then he says something in his lilting Belfast accent that is shot through with the sibling feeling none of us ever really manage to escape, however old or wise or clever we become. "When they told me they'd been over to the US to talk to so-and-so and met Yasser Arafat and all that, I was a bit jealous, to be honest. I mean, there was me stuck in a prison the whole day long and my two sisters were on planes and living the high life." He laughs at himself. "We joke about it still." Today, Brenda and Elaine still live in Belfast, but the three siblings see one another regularly and he talks to them a lot on the phone.

He keeps in close touch, too, with John McCarthy, the journalist who went to Beirut to cover Keenan's kidnapping, and instead became his cell-mate. He still considers McCarthy his closest friend and he and Audrey love seeing McCarthy, his wife, Anna, and their young daughter Lydia. "We get together as families – the boys love Lydia," he says. Both men have moved on, McCarthy like Keenan, helped significantly by having become a father. "We never talk about the past any more. It's an irrelevant thing. We talk about kids or work – or our holidays." But inevitably there are reminders, some of them funny. "We were in a taxi together in London, and the driver kept looking at us in his mirror," says Keenan. "And then he came through on his intercom and he said: 'Sorry to interrupt you gentlemen, but I couldn't help asking … wouldn't you be more comfortable travelling in the boot?'" He laughs for ages at the memory, then we go on to chat for a while about the family holiday two summers ago, when he and Audrey took the boys to Lebanon.

It wasn't her first choice of destination, she's happy to admit, but she sent Brian along first to check out that it really was safe for the boys. "We had a wonderful time," she says, and Keenan nods his head. "What we wanted was that they'd grow up with good memories of the place, that they'd find out that the people there are friendly and warm, before they found out the bad stuff," he says. "It all worked out really well in the end." As indeed it all has for Keenan. I'll Tell Me Ma: A Belfast Memoir by Brian Keenan is published by Jonathan Cape, priced £16.99. To order a copy for £15.99 with free UK p&p, go to theguardian.com/bookshop or call 0330 333 6846 DEN OF LIONS by Terry Anderson | Kirkus Reviews Tweet KIRKUS REVIEW Tremendously moving account by the AP's former Chief Middle East Correspondent of his 2,454 days as a hostage of the Islamic terrorist organization Hezbollah. Anderson's memoir comes fast after fellow hostage Brian Keenan's An Evil Cradling (p.

838) and complements it superbly. (A third hostage memoir, Terry Waite's Taken on Trust, is due out from Harcourt Brace in October but with no advance galleys.) Anderson shares neither Keenan's word-mastery nor his relentless focus on what goes on inside the hostage's cell, heart, and mind (Anderson's major attempts here at introspection, free-form poems that dot his text, are best overlooked). But the ex-reporter's plain and simple narration still packs a wallop and offers much deeper background on political maneuvers surrounding the hostage drama (including Oliver North and Ronald Reagan's respective roles)--with this background complemented by italicized reminiscences from Anderson's then- fiancÇe, Madeline Bassil. Anderson is also more frank than Keenan about the fluctuating condition of his fellow hostages (who for a time included Keenan himself), especially about squabbles (with up to five men chained into a tiny room, feuds sometimes lasted for weeks), as well as the madness that afflicted American hostage Frank Reed.

Otherwise, the memoir at hand much parallels Keenan's: a litany of abuse, suffering, and despair; a paean to love, hope, and courage--which, in Anderson's case, finds its wrenching apexes on the day when Terry Waite, after four years in solitary, is led into Anderson's group of hostages; and on the day when Anderson, blindfolded, feels ``Someone [put] a hand on my shoulder'' and is told, `I'm a Syrian colonel. You're free.' '' That a man can spend seven years chained to a wall and less than two years later write such a lucid and compassionate memoir of his ordeal is a remarkable testament to humanity--as well as an unimpeachable indictment of the terrorism that chained his body but not his spirit. (Photographs--not seen) Pub Date: Oct. 12th, 1993 ISBN: 0-517-59301-7 Kidnapped in Beirut - NYTimes.com Kidnapped in Beirut By Eugene Kennedy; Published: October 24, 1993 DEN OF LIONS Memoirs of Seven Years. By Terry A. Anderson. Illustrated.

356 pp. New York: Crown Publishers. $25. CHAINS TO ROSES The Joseph Cicippio Story. By Joseph Cicippio and Richard W. Hope. Illustrated. 216 pp. WRS Publishing, 701 North New Road, Waco, Tex. 76710. TAKEN ON TRUST By Terry Waite. Illustrated. 370 pp. New York: Harcourt Brace & Company. AN EVIL CRADLING By Brian Keenan. 296 pp. New York: Viking. $22.50. FOUR extraordinary memoirs by former hostages in Beirut are modern versions of the Book of Jonah. Like Jonah, each writer is swallowed by a great fish in the roiled waters of the Middle East and must survive a terrible isolation before being delivered for a life of prophecy. The point, both in the Bible and in these accounts, is not the special effects or even the fascinating historical details, but rather the spiritual meaning of living through a grueling and unjust yet mysterious and redeeming captivity.

These four stories -- which the authors, an aggressive journalist and a gentle accountant (both American), a conflicted English church worker and a defiant Irish poet, pull out of their souls -- overlap, carrying us, at first as reluctantly and uncertainly as the protagonists, into Beirut of the 1980's, thick with causes, death and betrayal. We are soon as absorbed by these men's lives as we are repelled by their captors and their tactics. The years of hostage taking play back in aching slow motion, taunting us with the possibility that we might still stop time and warn off the many men besides these who starting in 1982 were taken, usually in the course of homely errands, as bargaining chips by Hezbollah, the pro-Iranian Shiite Muslim group also known as the Party of God, or by groups like Islamic Jihad, believed to be allied with Hezbollah. One senses, however, that these four witnesses to that period when the harsh smell of terror saturated Beirut could not easily be called off from keeping appointments that for reasons, perhaps beyond their knowing and our full understanding, each had made with destiny.

Their tales of survival are also contemporary confessions, autobiographies of self-discovery and spiritual pilgrimage that are a welcome antidote to the sugary poisons of self-help, New Age fantasy and guilt laundering that sit smugly on bookstore shelves marked for spiritual reading. BEYOND its compelling reportage of his years in captivity, Terry Anderson's narrative, "Den of Lions," is an improbable and moving love story. Hard-drinking, world-weary, guilty over his broken marriage, Mr. Anderson emerges as a restless character in search of a Graham Greene to give form to his quest for salvation and a fixed and peaceful abode. The Associated Press's chief Middle East correspondent, he falls in love with a beautiful Lebanese Maronite Catholic, Madeleine Bassil. Already a worn-down hostage to his work -- based in southern Africa, he had asked for the Middle East assignment when Israel invaded Lebanon in June 1982 -- and on the edge of becoming a burned-out case, he is transformed by the relationship. Even the bloody shards of once elegant Beirut reassemble themselves as Paris for the lovers.

The idyll in the ruins is snapped a few months later, when, on March 16, 1985, he is seized on the street and forced into a green Mercedes. It had been following him -- the third Westerner to be taken in three days -- all morning. His divorce not final, he has been unable to marry Ms. Bassil, who is pregnant when he disappears. Her voice counterpoints his in telling of the near-biblical-numbered seven-year ordeal of captivity that now begins. The voice of the waiting loved one also alternates with that of the captive in "Chains to Roses," a forthcoming memoir by Joseph Cicippio (with Richard W. Hope, a writer of documentaries and of fiction). Like Ms. Bassil's, the narrative of Mr. Cicippio's wife, Elham, adds a "Rashomon" sense of watching from many points of view. These two valiant women echo the plangent longing of their shackled men. They also provide vivid anecdotes of their relationships with in-laws who suffered and campaigned for the release of all the hostages.

And with their help, we make acquaintance, though only glancingly in many cases, with the huge cast of Government officials, would-be negotiators, true helpers and authentic knaves who, along with presidents, kings and terrorists, played greater and lesser roles in the failed international chess game of kidnapping and bribery that served as a desperate substitute for foreign policy. THROUGH the women's narratives we also get a close look at one of the true heroes of that fierce period, the tall and handsome Italian diplomat, Giandomenico Picco, a special envoy from the Secretary General of the United Nations. Having been instrumental in negotiating an end to the Afghanistan war as well as the war between Iran and Iraq, he travels into the darkened heart of Beirut on the fumes of instinct alone to accomplish what others have taken credit for, the negotiation of the last remaining hostages' freedom. 1 Articles about Terry Anderson - latimes Ex-Hostage Terry Anderson Prepared to Sue Iran for $100 Million March 22, 1999 | Associated Press Terry Anderson is set to sue Iran for $100 million over the more than six years the former Associated Press correspondent was held hostage, shackled and blindfolded in Lebanon.

The lawsuit accuses Iran of having sponsored his captors. The lawsuit to be filed today in U.S. District Court in Washington also names as plaintiffs Anderson's wife, Madeleine Bassil, 49, and their 13-year-old daughter, Sulome, who seek redress for emotional distress and their long separation from Anderson. Advertisement WORLD : Day 2,000 for Terry Anderson September 5, 1990 | From Times Wire Services American journalist Terry Anderson today marked another grim milestone in his 5 1/2 years in captivity: his 2,000th day as a hostage. Anderson, 42, chief Middle East correspondent for the Associated Press, is the longest held of the six Americans, four Britons, two West Germans and one Italian who are captives in Lebanon. Most are held by pro-Iranian Shiite Muslim militants. ENTERTAINMENT Back to Beirut to Resume the Story November 30, 1996 | MICHELE WILLENS, SPECIAL TO THE TIMES Terry Anderson sits chain-smoking in a hangout near Columbia University.

That's where he's teaching journalism these days, something he knows quite a bit about, having been an Associated Press reporter in the Middle East for years. Students come for his expertise, certainly, but also to be near the man who was held hostage longer than any other in Lebanon, whose very existence became a negotiating tool. CALIFORNIA | LOCAL Don't Forget Terry Anderson March 21, 1990 Somewhere in the bloodstained rubble of Beirut our colleague Terry Anderson, chief Middle East correspondent of the Associated Press, has begun his sixth year of captivity. His cruel confinement is the longest yet endured by the 17 Western hostages still being held in Lebanon. Anderson's captors are Shiite Muslim extremists thought to enjoy some degree of Iranian patronage. Anderson, now 42, has a daughter he has never seen, born after he was abducted. NEWS Ex-Hostage Terry Anderson Prepared to Sue Iran for $100 Million March 22, 1999 | Associated Press Terry Anderson is set to sue Iran for $100 million over the more than six years the former Associated Press correspondent was held hostage, shackled and blindfolded in Lebanon. The lawsuit accuses Iran of having sponsored his captors.

The lawsuit to be filed today in U.S. District Court in Washington also names as plaintiffs Anderson's wife, Madeleine Bassil, 49, and their 13-year-old daughter, Sulome, who seek redress for emotional distress and their long separation from Anderson. NEWS Reporter Starts 7th Year as Hostage : Lebanon: Terry Anderson of AP is the longest held--and best known--of the Westerners abducted by Islamic fundamentalists. March 16, 1991 | MARILYN RASCHKA, SPECIAL TO THE TIMES In a city of 1.4 million people and a reputation for chaos, is it possible that a letter with only a name and "Beirut" for an address can be delivered? The answer is yes, if that name is Terry Anderson. Now 43, Anderson was kidnaped March 16, 1985 in Beirut. He was, at the time, chief Middle East correspondent for the Associated Press. Today, Anderson begins his seventh year as a captive and as the longest held of the 11 Western hostages in Lebanon, including five other Americans.

NEWS Freed Hostage Tells of Seeing American Captives : Mideast: Keenan is reunited with his two sisters. He describes his contacts with Terry Anderson and Thomas Sutherland in Lebanon. August 26, 1990 | From Associated Press Freed Irish hostage Brian Keenan returned to his homeland Saturday after telling reporters that he saw American hostages Terry Anderson and Thomas Sutherland during his four-year captivity in Lebanon and that both had been well. Keenan, 39, looking pale but otherwise physically fit as he stepped tentatively from an Irish government plane, had an emotional reunion earlier Saturday with his two sisters in the Syrian capital of Damascus, nearly 24 hours after he was freed by his captors in Beirut.

BOOKS Fraying Yellow Ribbon : FORGOTTEN: A Sister's Struggle to Save Terry Anderson, America's Longest-Held Hostage, By Peggy Say with Peter Knobler (Simon & Schuster: $22.95; 303 pp.) February 24, 1991 | Bob Sipchen, Sipchen is a Times staff writer currently working on a book on gangs and law enforcement for Doubleday On March 16, 1985, three men with automatic weapons dragged Terry Anderson into a green Mercedes and drove off into the chaos of Beirut. Anderson was chief correspondent for the Associated Press in Lebanon. Six years later, he remains America's longest-held hostage. From the moment Peggy Say received the 4 a.m. call informing her of her brother's kidnaping, his release became her obsession. NEWS Trying to Make Up for Lost Time : Homecoming: 'Don't rush her,' ex-hostage Jesse Turner advises Terry Anderson. Both men have emerged from captivity to meet their daughters for the first time.

December 6, 1991 | MARLENE CIMONS, TIMES STAFF WRITER Jesse (Jon) Turner has some gentle words for Terry Anderson to remember in the days that follow the newly released hostage's first meeting with the daughter he had never known. "Go slow," Turner said. "Don't expect too much too soon. You can't expect her to go 'Oh, Daddy! Daddy!' as if you'd just come back from the store. Let her approach you. Don't rush her. It takes time." Turner, who returned to his Boise, Ida. CALIFORNIA | LOCAL Culture Clashes in Minority Neighborhoods June 6, 1996 Re "The Culture Clash in South-Central L.A.," Commentary, May 29: As a Mexican immigrant from a large family, I can only imagine what Terry Anderson would think if my noisy clan moved into his formerly all-black neighborhood in South-Central Los Angeles. Having spent most of my life in poor to lower-middle-class Latino-dominant neighborhoods, I have never panicked when African Americans moved near, as they did when I lived near downtown or as they are doing now in my current neighborhood in Highland Park.

CALIFORNIA | LOCAL FREEDOM WATCH : Anderson's Files September 27, 1994 Terry Anderson spent 6 1/2 years as a hostage in Lebanon and now he wants to learn as much as possible about what his government knew of his ordeal, what it knew about his radical Muslim captors and what it did to try to win his freedom. Washington bureaucrats, however, apparently regard this information as none of Anderson's business. NEWS Anderson Sues for U.S. Files on Hostage Ordeal September 23, 1994 | From Associated Press Former hostage Terry Anderson filed suit against 13 government agencies Thursday, claiming all had withheld records covering the years he was held captive in the Middle East. Some bureaucrats, he says, won't release the papers without permission from his terrorist kidnapers. Anderson says the documents are his by right under the Freedom of Information Act. "The files probably contain some secrets I shouldn't know and I don't want those," Anderson told a news conference in his lawyers' office.

BOOKS Too Horrible to Tell : DEN OF LIONS: Memoirs of Seven Years, By Terry Anderson (Crown Publishers: $25; 349 pp.) : TAKEN ON TRUST, By Terry Waite (Harcourt Brace: $24.95; 384 pp.) : AN EVIL CRADLING: The Five-Year Ordeal of a Hostage, By Brian Keenan (Viking: $22.50; 297 pp.) October 24, 1993 | Christopher Dickey, Christopher Dickey, Paris bureau chief of Newsweek, is the author of "Expats: Travels in Arabia" (Atlantic Monthly Press) The world changed while Terry Anderson, Terry Waite and Brian Keenan languished in fear and filth and boredom in the dungeons of Lebanon. Every day, as the last half of the last decade passed, their horizons began and ended with the walls of makeshift cells. Their only dawn was the light from low-wattage bulbs. But they counted the days nonetheless: 1,597 for Keenan; 1,763 for Waite, 2,454 for Anderson.

And each of those days they would find escape in memory or imagination, only to have some small but terrible fact destroy their composure. NEWS Ex-Hostages Sticking Up for Lebanon : Reunion: 11 former captives gather to spark renewed interest in the beleaguered nation. December 3, 1992 | ROBERT W. STEWART, TIMES STAFF WRITER It could have been a reunion of Navy shipmates. Graying men, some with salt-and-pepper beards, held a cocktail in one hand and threw the other hand over the shoulder of a comrade from long ago. But the 11 who gathered at a downtown hotel Wednesday night to mix and mingle have a common history that is at once infinitely more public and yet far less accessible than the shared experiences of war veterans. All had been held hostage in Lebanon--and lived long enough to see their release. NEWS Freed Hostage Terry Anderson Resigns From Job as Journalist October 3, 1992 | From Reuters Terry A. Anderson, the American journalist held hostage for nearly seven years by Muslim extremists, said Friday that he was resigning from the Associated Press. Anderson, who was freed last Dec.

4 after being held captive in Lebanon, told newspaper executives at a meeting of the New England Newspaper Assn. that he was tired of being a reporter, according to people at the meeting in Mystic, Conn. BOOKS Too Horrible to Tell : DEN OF LIONS: Memoirs of Seven Years, By Terry Anderson (Crown Publishers: $25; 349 pp.) : TAKEN ON TRUST, By Terry Waite (Harcourt Brace: $24.95; 384 pp.) : AN EVIL CRADLING: The Five-Year Ordeal of a Hostage, By Brian Keenan (Viking: $22.50; 297 pp.) October 24, 1993 | Christopher Dickey, Christopher Dickey, Paris bureau chief of Newsweek, is the author of "Expats: Travels in Arabia" (Atlantic Monthly Press) The world changed while Terry Anderson, Terry Waite and Brian Keenan languished in fear and filth and boredom in the dungeons of Lebanon. Every day, as the last half of the last decade passed, their horizons began and ended with the walls of makeshift cells.

Their only dawn was the light from low-wattage bulbs. But they counted the days nonetheless: 1,597 for Keenan; 1,763 for Waite, 2,454 for Anderson. And each of those days they would find escape in memory or imagination, only to have some small but terrible fact destroy their composure. CALIFORNIA | LOCAL Brother Who Asked Release of Hostage in Beirut Dies June 9, 1986 | Associated Press Glenn Anderson, brother of Beirut hostage and Associated Press correspondent Terry Anderson, died Saturday of lung cancer on a plane flight home from New York, where he was being treated. He was 46. Glenn Anderson's death was the second in Terry Anderson's immediate family since the journalist was kidnaped in March, 1985. The Andersons' father, Glenn R. Anderson, died Feb. 15 at age 69, also of cancer. 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | Next NEWS Trying to Make Up for Lost Time : Homecoming: 'Don't rush her,' ex-hostage Jesse Turner advises Terry Anderson.

Both men have emerged from captivity to meet their daughters for the first time. December 6, 1991 | MARLENE CIMONS, TIMES STAFF WRITER Jesse (Jon) Turner has some gentle words for Terry Anderson to remember in the days that follow the newly released hostage's first meeting with the daughter he had never known. "Go slow," Turner said. "Don't expect too much too soon. You can't expect her to go 'Oh, Daddy! Daddy!' as if you'd just come back from the store. Let her approach you. Don't rush her. It takes time." Turner, who returned to his Boise, Ida. NEWS Wait Ends for Anderson's Ex-Colleague December 5, 1991 | JOHN NEEDHAM My friend Terry Anderson is coming home, wherever home is, whatever shape he's in. He spent 2,455 days imprisoned by terrorists who kidnaped him because of who he is, not for anything he did. Like so many of the people he wrote about over the years, he was an innocent victim.

When I watched him on TV Wednesday from Damascus, with the broken eyeglasses and the battered grin, I was amazed that he still had a sense of humor. Brian Keenan: 'A man can take away my freedom, but he can't ever take my liberty' | The Independent Profiles Brian Keenan: 'A man can take away my freedom, but he can't ever take my liberty' Blindfolded and chained, he was held captive by Islamic militants for four years. Yet Brian Keenan struggles to talk about the current hostage crisis in Iraq. Cole Moreton meets a man who has travelled to the ends of the earth to lay to rest the ghosts of his past Sunday 7 November 2004 00:00 BST Click to follow The Independent Online Nobody knows what Ken Bigley went through in his final days and hours and moments as well as Brian Keenan does. He spent four-and-a-half years bound and often blindfolded in cramped and fetid places in Middle-Eastern heat, fearing and expecting that his fanatical captors might kill him at any moment. Nobody knows what the kidnappers of Margaret Hassan and others were thinking and feeling and doing as well as Brian Keenan does.

He was held from 1986 to 1990, albeit in the Lebanon rather than Iraq, and spent much of his time in captivity studying, in the kind of obsessive detail that only a person with endless time and a mind desperate for activity can summon up, his surroundings, his reactions and the behaviour of the Islamic fundamentalists who held the guns and closed the cell door and beat him. That he survived at all was remarkable, but then he wrote powerfully and with almost superhuman empathy about his captors in a book, An Evil Cradling, in which he astonished many readers by his refusal to express bitterness towards those who held him. Instead Keenan has described as victims those men who lashed the soles of their captives' feet then tried to tell them jokes; who gave them meagre, rancid rations most of the time but also laid on a birthday feast.

They were, he wrote recently, "Chained to their guns, imprisoned by a world-view born of ignorance and fear." I want to ask him if he feels that way about the hostage-takers in Iraq, when we meet in the pine-and-chrome lobby of a drab hotel on a filthy day in Belfast, not far from where he was born and raised. So it is disconcerting when he tells me, as we buy gin and tonic and whiskey from the bar to fortify ourselves against the damp afternoon, how he has refused to do another interview because the discussion was not going to be confined to his new book, about a journey into the wilderness of Alaska. "They're not interested. They want to talk about Iraq but I'm not going to. I don't have any answers. I don't know about Iraq. I don't know anything about the Middle East. I'm not a spokesman on international politics." Hang on a minute, I say, I heard you on the radio at lunchtime calling George Bush, "the Ayatollah in the White House". You threw yourself into the centre of the debate, using your status as a former hostage. "They asked me a question," he says, eyes narrowing.

"You can't just refuse to answer." He could have done. Instead he gave a passionate answer. "Well it was my view. When people in powerful places point the finger of guilt and call people evil, we've got problems, because that's not the language we need in the 21st Century. When Ayatollahs in the White House start screaming about the axis of evil, we're all in trouble." There are hostages in captivity as we speak. Is it any wonder that we turn to those who can help us understand what they are going through? "Maybe. But what I went through is not so very different from someone who is in a hospice knowing that they're dying. There is no way out of that. It is not so very different from a mother who has been told her three-year-old child will not see his fifth birthday and who has to get up every morning and dress him, feed him, play with him, and ensure his world is the best it can be. I would not like to be that mother. I couldn't do that.

Somebody who has gone through trauma that was equally difficult to deal with as mine might have as many answers as me." His reaction to his experiences has given him something valuable to say about the problems in Iraq, though. When we're upstairs in his room, with the rain lashing against a tiny window, blurring the view of a car park, I try to convince him as much. Empathy is his answer. It's what makes some people very angry with him and others admiring. The phrase about his captors being chained to their guns came from a piece he wrote earlier this year to mark the release of Blind Flight, a film based on the close relationship between Keenan and his fellow Beirut captive John McCarthy. He also wrote for the BBC website last month, describing the mindset of Islamic groups who began taking hostages to highlight their cause in the 1980s. "If these men talked about the dispossessed and the poor of the world and the spectre of international capitalism, that is because that was their very real experience of the world," he said. "These are people who want to be heard, who feel in their skin the exclusion of the world and so turn against it.

Flight or fight is a human response and these people were human even if their abuse of us was gratuitous and bestial at times." "Bravo!" wrote Riaz Quadir of Versailles in France on the website in response. "We still have some heroes left. To even attempt to understand the religion behind one's capturers, abusers and torturers is an act of spirituality." Stan, from the USA, found his sympathy for the captors "disturbing and sickening". Brian Keenan nods when I tell him what Stan said. He gulps some gin. He would be easy to mistake for a curmudgeon, this man in his polished brown shoes and black trousers, with a belly pressing against his bottle-green shirt that is a reminder it was 14 years ago he emerged from captivity, emaciated. He's friendly enough, though. There is no malice in his protests, just a weariness. He looks and sounds like Van Morrison's teacher brother, but he could * teach Van a thing or two about generosity of spirit, by all accounts. He could teach most of us the same things, actually. Just don't ask him to, at least directly.

"Maybe when you write this, everybody will finally get it through their thick heads that he's not going to talk about Iraq. Because he doesn't want to. Because he hasn't got the authority to." Brian Keenan beat his captors: by choosing not to be frightened when they demanded that he should be. By refusing to feel cold when they took away his clothes. By not eating the fruit they brought him, even though it was a rare treat, and instead letting it rot as he relished the colours, textures and smells he had long been denied. If they threw food at him, to demonstrate their power, he threw it back. Even now he habitually seeks to avoid the constrictions imposed on him by other people. He is uneasy about being seen as some kind of sage, but speaks gnomic words of wisdom. He recoils from being called a hero, then suggests a definition of courage in his own terms. "If courage is about anything, it is about knowing that everything is within yourself. A man can take away my freedom, he can take all my clothes, he can lock me up - but he can't ever, ever, take my liberty. I alone possess that. I know the measure of it, the depth.

I alone can enter into it. Courage is knowing what to do with that self-understanding. Courage is about finding quiet and content and having the capacity to share that. It's not about going out to lead the world with messianic rants and raves." After the claustrophobic intensity of An Evil Cradling, his new book, Four Quarters of Light, almost reads as a celebration of life and liberty. The man standing in awe of the mountains is the same man who lived in a tiny, cramped space for so long. The man who talks to a dog musher and an Eskimo shaman about their solitary lives in a place called the Big Lonely is the man who had no company but his own for so long. Keenan owes his unique voice to captivity. "Yes, absolutely. What's the famous line of Yeats? 'I must lay down where all the ladders start, in the foul rag-and-bone shop of the heart.' I spent four-and-a-half years in that place. What I learnt about myself and my capacities and my desires I could not have found anywhere else." He was restless, in the first three decades of his life.

After school in east Belfast he worked as a plumber's apprentice but then went to university to read English literature. He kept returning to Belfast after working in Spain, Brussels and Scotland, but at the age of 34 he decided to cut free of a city that was "falling apart". He took up a year's contract to teach English and Russian literature at the American University in the Lebanon, intending to travel on to Australia when it expired. One early morning in April 1986, after four months in Beirut, he was surprised at the gates of his villa and bundled into a car. The kidnappers were not like those currently operating in Iraq, he says: they were part of a small group funded from within Iran, angry at the economic sanctions imposed on that country. They took hostages to get publicity for their opposition to the way Britain, America and Israel were supporting Iraq in its war on their country. Moved from one secret cell to another, he was taken to the edge of death and madness - but captivity also gave him a gift.

"There is a line in the Koran - my Arabic is not very good - when the prophet is talking to his followers about the taking of captives, and he says, "Give them a Koran that they may take with them when they go more than they had when they were first taken." I had years to sort my priorities and understanding out to a depth that very few of us have the chance of in our lives. Mind you, sometimes that can be a bit damaging. You can lock yourself up within yourself. Then you don't come out." Keenan was released suddenly in 1990, handed over under cover of darkness to the Syrian secret service. International sympathies were changing - Iraq was about to become the enemy rather than the friend of America. Keenan campaigned hard for the release of his fellow captives, who included the American Terry Anderson, the Archbishop of Canterbury's special envoy Terry Waite, and the journalist John McCarthy, with whom he still shares a close bond. They were all released, eventually. Keenan spent much of the first few years after his ordeal living alone on the west coast of Ireland. There would be echoes of this withdrawal in his decision to visit Alaska a decade later.

"Wilderness to the creative mind is like a blank canvas to a painter," he writes in Four Quarters of Light. "It is full of possibilities. Here is perfect peace and absolute freedom; here too may be the prologue of melancholy or bliss." As we sit in his hotel room in Belfast city centre, Keenan tells me how he was a fast reader as a boy. A teacher let him have early access to the school library and he chose The Call of The Wild by Jack London, about a dog who lives among wolves in Alaska. Two years ago, he decided to return to Alaska, ostensibly to hunt down the ghost of Jack London. "This was, in a very real sense, the final frontier for me. At my age I wasn't going to go anywhere again, not on a big trip like this." He also decided to take Audrey, his wife, and their sons Cal and Jack who were aged nearly two and four, with him. "I wanted Jack particularly, to see in reality the Alaska that I saw in my head when I was about two years older than him, at a primary school in Belfast.

Those are the words of a father who survived incarceration largely by retelling the stories he had read and seen and over and again to avoid going mad. People who know Keenan say he is nowhere near as melancholy as he seems - "I can be funny," he protests. "I tell jokes that last four days. That probably bores people stupid. That must be why they say it: I can make anybody melancholic with my humour" - and the joke in Four Quarters is that Keenan explores an Alaska that Jack London turns out to have barely known. "He was in Fairbanks about three days. So that agenda about London fell away and I found there was something else compelling me there." It turned out to be about imposing his own will on his previous experiences. "Something in my past had to be validated. The solitude that I knew on my holidays in Lebanon, as I call them, was enforced. Maybe the lure of this journey, or the unconscious narrative behind it, was, 'I have to go back to Alaska and test against free will and choice that which I experienced when I had no free will or choice. To validify it.'" What was it he was validating? "Self-sufficiency. Self-awareness," he says.

"I did find that all the contemplative self-inspection that I went through in Lebanon had some validity. It returned to me in the absolute freedom and splendour of Alaska." There he also had several profound encounters with Inuit spirituality that moved him deeply. In the extremes of the Arctic circle he found ghosts, spirits and totem animals, and a belief that places "give off a scent of their history and of hardship... or nourish you in a way that others cannot." If I ask him what he has learnt he will protest that he is not a sage or a seer, even if he sometimes sounds like he wants to be one. A part-time mystic, I say, and he laughs. "That'll do me." So how the six-month journey change him? "I wouldn't know." As a hostage Keenan went to the frontiers of suffering. Now as a writer he has been to the savage wilderness on our behalf to see what is there. He told John McCarthy you should never give your whole heart away. He still, habitually, avoids captivity. "I'm still looking for answers," he says, smiling. "I hope that book didn't give any.

I only have questions." 'Four Quarters of Light', by Brian Keenan, is published by Transworld, priced £18.99 The Beirut hostages Tom Sutherland, now 70, was dean at the American University in Beirut when he was abducted in 1985. The Scots-born professor received £25million compensation from the Iranian government 10 years after his release in 1991. Sutherland, who lives in Denver, Colorado, gave much of the money to charity. Terry Anderson, 56, spent six years as a hostage of Shia militiamen. He is now a regular on the US lecture circuit, has written several books, campaigns for imprisoned journalists and recently announced plans to run for the Ohio Senate. John McCarthy, 47, was abducted in 1986 and spent five years in captivity, becoming Britain's longest-held hostage. He has written several books and regularly lectures on his experiences. He split from Jill Morrell, who had campaigned for his freedom, in 1995 and later married. McCarthy supports the Medical Foundation for the Care of Victims of Torture.

Terry Waite, 65, went to Beirut in 1987 as an envoy of the Archbishop of Canterbury, to negotiate the release of hostages. He was kidnapped himself and held for four years. In 1993, he wrote the book of his experiences, Taken on Trust. He now works with several homelessness charities and campaigns against human-rights abuses in Guantanamo Bay. Katie Guest BBC NEWS | UK | Northern Ireland | Film tells of hostages' struggle Film tells of hostages' struggle A new film tells the story of former Beirut hostage Brian Keenan A new film tells the true story of two former Beirut hostages who forge a deep friendship in their struggle to survive. It took 14 years for Brian Keenan's idea to become a celluloid reality. But in Dublin on Thursday, Blind Flight - the story of the imprisonment of Belfast-born Keenan and his friend, TV producer John McCarthy - had its premiere. The two men were kidnapped separately by Arab fundamentalists in Lebanon in April 1986. They were held in a room together, blindfolded and shackled to a radiator, for nearly four and a half years. They endured beatings, chains and incarceration. Together, they tried to help each other survive.

Keenan was finally released in 1990 and McCarthy was freed a year later. That is how we survived - by trying desperately to understand what each other needed - even when we were at our wits' end John McCarthy The film screenplay was written by both men and draws on Keenan's book about his captivity, An Evil Cradling. But, speaking at the film's press launch in Dublin on Thursday, Keenan said that working on the film had not brought back haunting memories. "I think what ever healing was needing to be done, was done on my own. It is the only way that healing works. It doesn't work in a collective atmosphere," he said. "My view is the only way you heal is to go back into that place that you have come out of, on your own. That was done a long while ago in a little cottage at the back of Croagh Patrick in the west of Ireland." Human survival He said the film was not meant to replicate exactly what happened in a dark cell in Beirut 15 years ago, but rather to get at the truth of how people survive and grow.

"What it did tend to do was to address the various deep human truths by which we all grow and re-experience the value of ourselves and the value of others. "That was the intention of the film and that is why the film works." John McCarthy's mother died while he was held hostage. He said watching "Blind Flight" was very moving. "I found it very powerful, particularly the scenes where Brian was comforting me after seeing a video of my mother - to remember how much we cared for each other. "That is how we survived - by trying desperately to understand what each other needed - even when we were at our wits' end." The film was made with the support of the Northern Ireland Film and TV Commission, The Irish Film Council and other funders. It was shot in Belfast, Glasgow and Tunisia.

Question: Which former Middle East hostage wrote the book 'An Evil Cradling'?
Answer: Brian Keenan