A moving personal account that offers profound insights into Islamic terrorism and the struggle against it.
A Belgian military veteran and former United Nations peacekeeper tells how he rescued his son from the infamous terrorist group.
Failing to find help from Belgian authorities when his son, Jay, disappeared, Bontinck had no alternative but to fall back on his own resources. Fortunately, he was armed with both love for his son and the personal courage sufficient to succeed against the deadly dangers he encountered during his mission. His personal, in-depth account is a powerful dissection of the step-by-step recruitment of his son into the web of Islamic terrorist networks. This process began when Jay’s new girlfriend, a Muslim from Morocco, asked, “why don’t you convert to Islam?” After attending a few services at a local mosque, he changed his name and clothing, grew a beard, and became a participant in a radical group called Sharia4Belgium. When Jay was 18, Bontinck learned that a friend had called to tell Jay that he was in Syria along with all of Jay’s friends. Jay deceived his father with a duplicitous cover story and left to join them. Discovering a clue to his son’s whereabouts from a video on YouTube, he began his quest to find him. Jay, meanwhile, had aroused the suspicions of the terrorists and been thrown into an underground dungeon as a suspected enemy agent. Frequently one step behind Jay’s captors, the author was captured but was able to escape, and he developed a network that helped him track down his son, who had been sent to die working in Aleppo. Arrested as a terrorist on his return, Jay provided information to law enforcement and helped convict the recruitment network in court. Bontinck had done what no one had before, and he became the person other families could turn to for help.
A moving personal account that offers profound insights into Islamic terrorism and the struggle against it.Pub Date: Aug. 8, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-250-14758-5
Page Count: 288
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: June 5, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2017
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
PERSPECTIVES
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
