Christa P. (romeo) reviewed No Hiding Place: The New York Times Inside Report on the Hostage Crisis on + 334 more book reviews
As a result of an unprecedented investigation and reconstruction by The New York Times, the fascinating story of the hostage crisis can be told with an authority and clarity that eluded a frustrated world for the 444 days of the hostages' captivity and beyond.
The seizing of the American hostages by Iranian student militants was at once stunning in its brutal simplicity and one of the most complex and tortuous incidents of international political violence in modern history. The New York Times assigned 2 dozen reporters to the hostage families from the very beginning of the hostage crisis, enabling it to piece together the whole bizarre experience of the hostages in their own vivid words, establishing a background for understanding that no individual hostage could provide by himself.No Hiding Place tells in riveting and gritty detail the story-much expanded from the early accounts-of what it was like being taken hostage, how the hostages related to eachother, how they behaved toward their captors, how in their vacuum and literally incommunicado for long periods they related desperately to what they imagined was going on in the world beyond. It tells how they individually responded to constant duress, the arbitrariness of their captors, the frequent threats of summary death, the feeling of havinig been abandoned by their countrymen, and their total insecurity about the final solution to the crisis...
The seizing of the American hostages by Iranian student militants was at once stunning in its brutal simplicity and one of the most complex and tortuous incidents of international political violence in modern history. The New York Times assigned 2 dozen reporters to the hostage families from the very beginning of the hostage crisis, enabling it to piece together the whole bizarre experience of the hostages in their own vivid words, establishing a background for understanding that no individual hostage could provide by himself.No Hiding Place tells in riveting and gritty detail the story-much expanded from the early accounts-of what it was like being taken hostage, how the hostages related to eachother, how they behaved toward their captors, how in their vacuum and literally incommunicado for long periods they related desperately to what they imagined was going on in the world beyond. It tells how they individually responded to constant duress, the arbitrariness of their captors, the frequent threats of summary death, the feeling of havinig been abandoned by their countrymen, and their total insecurity about the final solution to the crisis...
