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
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
© Copyright 2024 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.
bookshelf
