A house in the sky A memoir

Review by New York Times Review

A memoir of a young wanderer's brutal ordeal in captivity, and how it was transformed into spiritual triumph. AMANDA LINDHOUT GREW UP rough. Born in Alberta, Canada, she spent childhood nights lying in her top bunk, listening to her mother, Lorinda , being beaten badly by her boyfriend. By the fourth grade, Lindhout was Dumpster diving for bottles and cans with her older brother. Flush with recycling money, she haunted a nearby thriftstore to buy National Geographics. Between the yellow borders, she studied "the mossy temples at Angkor," "skeletons brushed free of volcano ash on Vesuvius," Palestinian refugee children squatting "in tents the color of potatoes." She trained her mind to escape from the violence around her. Grounded in chaos, her childhood becomes a disturbing template for the life that followed. On Aug. 23, 2008, along with a freelance photojournalist named Nigel Brennan, Lindhout, then 27, was kidnapped in Somalia. She spent 460 days in hellish captivity. Her tale, exquisitely told with her co-author, Sara Corbett, a contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine, is much more than a gonzo adventure tale gone awry - it's a young woman's harrowing coming-of-age story and an extraordinary narrative of forgiveness and spiritual triumph. Lindhout began her extreme travels at age 20, heading first to Venezuela. She financed her peripatetic lifestyle by saving the tips she made as a high-end cocktail waitress, taking offfor months at a time, roving on a shoestring budget through Central and South America, Asia, and Africa. Seeking excitement and counting countries, she vowed from a mountaintop to "always push forward, no matter what." This wasn't simple thrill seeking, she argues. It was a calling. Each border she crossed "felt like a revelation. It was better than school. It was better than church." The Amanda Lindhout of the book's first 100 pages is almost all action, little reflection. Epiphanies here are a bit too tidy. Facing a rare twinge of fear before entering Afghanistan in 2005, Lindhout turned to Eckhart Tolle's "Power of Now." She took its teaching to mean she should listen beyond her mind's incessant worries to the voice of her spirit, which urged her onward. Six days later she was robbed in a crowded market, a pistol's muzzle jammed beneath her ribs. The lesson she derived is void of selfcriticism and disappointingly pert: Don't mess with Afghanistan. Once the bruise from the gun had healed, Lindhout remained convinced of her invincibility. Eight months later, wandering through Ethiopia, she met and fell in love with Brennan, a 35-year-old Australian trying to jump-start his photo journalism career. When he eventually confessed he was married, Lindhout's plans to join him in Australia disintegrated. She moved on, but decided to try paying for her travels as a novice photojournalist like Brennan. She returned to Afghanistan, then journeyed to Baghdad after landing a dodgy job as an on-camera correspondent for a television channel financed by the Iranian government. This earned the guileless Lindhout the disdain of the Baghdad-based press corps. When other reporters discovered her live standups for the Iranians on YouTube, in which she, "quick-talking and naïve," had criticized their work, she decamped to Kenya, a jumping-offpoint for journalists covering the war in Somalia. Lindhout hoped to make her bones in Somalia, "the most dangerous country on earth." She also persuaded Brennan - now divorced - to join her. She missed him, she writes, but "the reality was that I was starting to need Nigel, or somebody, to come with me and share the costs." At this moment in the memoir , Lindhout is not an especially sympathetic character. She seems more interested in the rush than in the work she's doing, and it's unclear what besides ego and adrenaline are propelling her. Yet absolutely nothing she does or has done up to this point renders her responsible for the brutality that followed, or can explain how she emerged with unfathomable grace and wisdom. In mid-August 2008, when she and Brennan landed in the wrecked city of Mogadishu with no clue what they were doing and no assignments to speak of (other than a travel column Lindhout was writing for her hometown paper, The Red Deer Advocate ), their already tenuous situation took an immediate turn for the worse. Their experienced guide fobbed them offon an assistant. After a few frustrating days, they set out one afternoon to visit a hospital and camp for displaced people, led by a singular Somali doctor. On the road, disaster struck in the form of heavily armed gunmen, who dragged them into captivity. IT'S HERE that the narrative begins to gain its tremendous power. As Lindhout's external landscape turns upside down, her inner one sharpens and deepens. From their first hours as prisoners, she and Brennan were forced to negotiate their uncertain survival with a shifting array of captors possessed of differing manners and agendas. Heartbreakingly, Lindhout called each man "brother"; she hoped that through her scant command of Islam she could connect with them. She dreaded being separated from Brennan and raped. Her illusion of control had yet to shatter as she racked her brain for ways to communicate: "If only we could hit upon the right strategy for talking to the men holding us." There was no such strategy. On learning she was being held for a ransom of $1.5 million, Lindhout despaired. She knew her impoverished family could do little to save her. So without Brennan's assent, she announced to the militants that the two of them wanted to convert to Islam. Conversion was, at first, a gambit to save their lives. Reading and memorizing the Koran, however, became a form of solace. They studied not as believers, but as prosecutorial lawyers looking for chapters and verses with which to make a case for their safety. As Lindhout puts it: "I read the book in hopes of using their religion to talk my way out." She searched desperately to find words that forbade her captors from violating her. Instead, she discovered verses that suggested the opposite. The first of her rapists arrived. There's no self-pity or grandiosity in these pages. The rage and self-hatred born out of bad decisions and bad luck have long since burned into a clearhearted attempt to record the cruelties Lindhout endured. (She has since created a foundation that seeks to educate Somali youth.) In the cleanest prose, she and Corbett allow events both horrific and absurd - like Lindhout's diligently translating, from a smartphone, a message to jihadis from Osama bin Laden - to unfold on their own. Lindhout's resilience transforms the story from a litany of horrors into a humbling encounter with the human spirit. To withstand her anguish, she recited a catalog of the small gifts for which she was grateful: "my family at home, the oxygen in my lungs," the fact that "Jamal set my food down on the floor instead of throwing it at me." She practiced compassion for her captors even after they gang-raped her, an episode she recounts with characteristic restraint, rendering it all the more terrible for what is leftunsaid: "Together, they crossed into a darker place, where there was no retrievable dignity for anybody. They became guilty, one the same as another. I bled not for hours or days but for weeks afterward." Most remarkably, in total darkness, Lindhout transcended her starving, feverish body. She built first stairways, then rooms in the stillness of the air above her. She built, as the title suggests, a "house in the sky," where "the voices that normally tore through my head expressing fear and wishing for death went silent, until there was only one leftspeaking." This voice asks, "In this exact moment, are you O.K.?" She answers, "Yes, right now I am still O.K." A HOUSE IN THE SKY By Amanda Lindhout and Sara Corbett 373 pp. Scribner. $27. ELIZA GRISWOLD, a 2012 Guggenheim fellow, is the author of "The Tenth Parallel."

Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [September 15, 2013]

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Review by Booklist Review

*Starred Review* Lindhout, with coauthor Corbett, recounts her 15 months in captivity at the hands of Somalian kidnappers in this harrowing memoir. Growing up in Alberta, Canada, Lindhout used her spending money to purchase old issues of National Geographic. As a young woman, she yearned to venture to the exotic places she saw on its pages and soon found she could save up enough money waitressing to fund months' worth of travel. Starting with Venezuela at age 19, she eventually journeyed to India, Pakistan, and Afghanistan. Deciding to pursue a career as a journalist, she ventured first into Iraq and then convinced Nigel, a former lover turned friend, to join her in Somalia. Four days into their visit, they were taken hostage by Somali bandits, most of whom were young teens. The kidnappers demanded outrageous ransoms from their parents, and began to treat Lindhout, far more than her male counterpart, with increasing brutality. Writing with immediacy and urgency, Lindhout and Corbett recount the horrific ordeal in crisp, frank, evocative prose. But what readers will walk away with is an admiration for Lindhout's deep reserves of courage under unimaginable circumstances.--Huntley, Kristine Copyright 2010 Booklist

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.

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Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

Canadian journalist Lindhout gives a well-honed, harrowing account of her 459-day captivity at the hands of Somali Islamist rebels. Bit by the travel bug early in her life, partly due to the stultifying conditions at home in Sylvan Lake, in Alberta, Canada, where she lived with her single mom and abusive Native American boyfriend, Lindhout was attracted to the exotic world depicted within the pages of National Geographic and vowed to "go somewhere" as soon as she could. Working at an Alberta nightclub called the Drink, Lindhout was able to cobble together money to travel over the years, eventually finding herself in Africa and the Middle East, freelancing as a photographer and journalist and having a love affair with a (married) Australian photographer, Nigel Brennan. Convinced war-torn Somalia would be the "hurricane" to make her career, in August 2008, at age 25, she and Nigel flew to Mogadishu, and, with a "fixer" and an SUV full of official "guards," set off to view a displaced-persons' camp but was instead carjacked by a group of kidnappers who demanded millions from the Westerners' families. Her captors moved her frequently from hideout to hideout, and she eventually converted to Islam ("They can't kill us if we convert," she told Nigel), was separated from Nigel, and was raped and tortured. Lindhout attempted escape but no one came to her aid. She and Nigel miraculously survived as their families and governments dickered over ransom negotiations. (Sept.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

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Review by Library Journal Review

Lindhout spent her childhood paging through old thrift store copies of National Geographic, dreaming of a world beyond her small Canadian hometown, and as an adult she saved her tips from her waitressing jobs to fund her travels abroad. She attempted to turn her passion for travel into a career in journalism by taking risky, undesirable assignments. It was one such opportunity in Somalia that would change her life forever when she and her friend Nigel were kidnapped and held for ransom for 460 days. She endured horrific conditions and abuse at the hands of her captors but was often able to find inner strength despite the external chaos. Lindhout narrates, her voice seldom quavering despite having to recount the personal details of her nightmarish ordeal. She rarely turns to anger as a method for coping with her circumstances and is introspective as she chronicles her time in captivity. VERDICT Recommended. ["Moving and informative reading for everyone," read the starred review of the Scribner hc, LJ 9/15/13.-Ed.]-Theresa Horn, St. Joseph Cty. P.L., South Bend, IN (c) Copyright 2014. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

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Review by Kirkus Book Review

With the assistance of New York Times Magazine writer Corbett, Lindhout, who was held hostage in Somalia for more than a year, chronicles her harrowing ordeal and how she found the moral strength to survive. In 2008, Lindhout, after working as a cocktail waitress to earn travel money, was working as a freelance journalist. In an attempt to jump-start her fledgling career, she planned to spend 10 days in Mogadishu, a "chaotic, anarchic, staggeringly violent city." She hoped to look beyond the "terror and strife [that] hogged the international headlines" and find "something more hopeful and humane running alongside it." Although a novice journalist, she was an experienced, self-reliant backpacker who had traveled in Afghanistan and Pakistan. She hired a company to provide security for her and her companion, the Australian photographer Nigel Brennan, but they proved unequal to the task. Their car was waylaid by a gunman, and the group was taken captive and held for ransom. Her abductors demanded $2 million, a sum neither family could raise privately or from their governments. Negotiations played out over 15 months before an agreement for a much smaller sum was reached. The first months of their captivity, until they attempted an escape, were difficult but bearable. Subsequently, they were separated, chained, starved and beaten, and Lindhout was repeatedly raped. Survival was a minute-by-minute struggle not to succumb to despair and attempt suicide. A decision to dedicate her life to humanitarian work should she survive gave meaning to her suffering. As she learned about the lives of her abusers, she struggled to understand their brutality in the context of their ignorance and the violence they had experienced in their short lives. Her guards were young Muslim extremists, but their motive was financial. Theirs was a get-rich scheme that backfired. "Hostage taking is a business, a speculative one," Lindhout writes, "fed by people like me--the wandering targets, the fish found out of water, the comparatively rich moving against a backdrop of poor." A vivid, gut-wrenching, beautifully written, memorable book.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

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A House in the Sky Prologue We named the houses they put us in. We stayed in some for months at a time; other places, it was a few days or a few hours. There was the Bomb-Making House, then the Electric House. After that came the Escape House, a squat concrete building where we'd sometimes hear gunfire outside our windows and sometimes a mother singing nearby to her child, her voice low and sweet. After we escaped the Escape House, we were moved, somewhat frantically, to the Tacky House, into a bedroom with a flowery bedspread and a wooden dresser that held hair sprays and gels laid out in perfect rows, a place where, it was clear from the sound of the angry, put-upon woman jabbering in the kitchen, we were not supposed to be. When they took us from house to house, it was anxiously and silently and usually in the quietest hours of night. Riding in the backseat of a Suzuki station wagon, we sped over paved roads and swerved onto soft sandy tracks through the desert, past lonely-looking acacia trees and dark villages, never knowing where we were. We passed mosques and night markets strung with lights and men leading camels and groups of boisterous boys, some of them holding machine guns, clustered around bonfires along the side of the road. If anyone had tried to see us, we wouldn't have registered: We'd been made to wear scarves wrapped around our heads, cloaking our faces the same way our captors cloaked theirs--making it impossible to know who or what any of us were. The houses they picked for us were mostly deserted buildings in tucked-away villages, where all of us--Nigel, me, plus the eight young men and one middle-aged captain who guarded us--would remain invisible. All of these places were set behind locked gates and surrounded by high walls made of concrete or corrugated metal. When we arrived at a new house, the captain fumbled with his set of keys. The boys, as we called them, rushed in with their guns and found rooms to shut us inside. Then they staked out their places to rest, to pray, to pee, to eat. Sometimes they went outside and wrestled with one another in the yard. There was Hassam, who was one of the market boys, and Jamal, who doused himself in cologne and mooned over the girl he planned to marry, and Abdullah, who just wanted to blow himself up. There was Yusuf and Yahya and Young Mohammed. There was Adam, who made calls to my mother in Canada, scaring her with his threats, and Old Mohammed, who handled the money, whom we nicknamed Donald Trump. There was the man we called Skids, who drove me out into the desert one night and watched impassively as another man held a serrated knife to my throat. And finally, there was Romeo, who'd been accepted into graduate school in New York City but first was trying to make me his wife. Five times a day, we all folded ourselves over the floor to pray, each holding on to some secret ideal, some vision of paradise that seemed beyond our reach. I wondered sometimes whether it would have been easier if Nigel and I had not been in love once, if instead we'd been two strangers on a job. I knew the house he lived in, the bed he'd slept in, the face of his sister, his friends back home. I had a sense of what he longed for, which made me feel everything doubly. When the gunfire and grenade blasts between warring militias around us grew too thunderous, too close by, the boys loaded us back into the station wagon, made a few phone calls, and found another house. Some houses held ghost remnants of whatever family had occupied them--a child's toy left in a corner, an old cooking pot, a rolled-up musty carpet. There was the Dark House, where the most terrible things happened, and the Bush House, which seemed to be way out in the countryside, and the Positive House, almost like a mansion, where just briefly things felt like they were getting better. At one point, we were moved to a second-floor apartment in the heart of a southern city, where we could hear cars honking and the muezzins calling people to prayer. We could smell goat meat roasting on a street vendor's spit. We listened to women chattering as they came and went from the shop right below us. Nigel, who had become bearded and gaunt, could look out the window of his room and see a sliver of the Indian Ocean, a faraway ribbon of aquamarine. The water's proximity, like that of the shoppers and the cars, both comforted and taunted. If we somehow managed to get away, it was unclear whether we'd find any help or simply get kidnapped all over again by someone who saw us the same way our captors did--not just as enemies but enemies worth money. We were part of a desperate, wheedling multinational transaction. We were part of a holy war. We were part of a larger problem. I made promises to myself about what I'd do if I got out. Take Mom on a trip. Do something good for other people. Make apologies. Find love. We were close and also out of reach, thicketed away from the world. It was here, finally, that I started to believe this story would be one I'd never get to tell, that I would become an erasure, an eddy in a river pulled suddenly flat. I began to feel certain that, hidden inside Somalia, inside this unknowable and stricken place, we would never be found. Excerpted from A House in the Sky: A Memoir by Amanda Lindhout, Sara Corbett All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.

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