Home › Books › Proof of Life: Twenty Days on the Hunt for a Miss…
Proof of Life: Twenty Days on the Hunt for a Missing Person in the Middle East
by
30/99
Critics
57/99
Readers
n/a
Scholars
8/99
Rating
52/99
Volume
88/99
Rating
26/99
Volume
—
Sign in to add to your shelf, rate, or review this book.
About This Book
"Riveting . . . Well-written and highly compelling. "— Wall Street Journal "Truly thrilling. Daniel Levin brilliantly conveys both the menace and the evil of Middle Eastern intrigue, and some victories of human kindness over cruelty and despair."—Daniel Kahneman, New York Times bestselling author of Thinking, Fast and Slow Daniel Levin was in his New York office when he got a call from an acquaintance with an urgent, cryptic request to meet in Paris. A young man had gone missing in Syria. No government, embassy, or intelligence agency would help. Could he? Would he? So begins a suspenseful, shocking, and at times brutal true story of one man's search to find a missing person in Syria over twenty tense days. Levin, a lawyer turned armed-conflict negotiator, chases leads throughout the Middle East, meeting with powerful sheikhs, drug lords, and sex traffickers in his pursuit of the truth. In Proof of Life , Levin dives deep into the shadows—an underground industry of war where everything is for sale, including arms, drugs, and even people. He offers a fascinating study of how people use leverage to get what they want from one another and of a place where no one does a favor without wanting something in return, whether it's immediately or years down the road. A fast-paced thriller wrapped in a memoir, Proof of Life is a cinematic must-read by an author with access to a world that usually remains hidden.
Preview
Reviews
"That requires a great deal of trust in the author, not least given the myriad pseudonyms employed to protect people's identities ..."
"Levin's story is not an easy one to experience, but it is an important one."
"Although Khalid has plenty of shady connections with the rich and powerful on all sides of the region's rivalries, he also serves as one of the book's much-needed moral compasses ..."
"There are ample details about other cases of kidnapped Westerners in the Middle East and vivid profiles of regional power brokers, smugglers, and funders of terrorism, but Levin's reconstructed dialogue occasionally rings false and the discovery of Blocher's fate is somewhat anticlimactic."
"I suspect that if Levin had conducted at least some of his search inside Syria, reality sooner or later would have forced him to toss his game theory away."
Reader Reviews
0 reviewsSign in to write a review.
No reader reviews yet. Be the first!