Overview

Michael Scott Moore, a journalist and the author of Sweetness and Blood, incorporates personal narrative and rigorous investigative journalism in this profound and revelatory memoir of his three-year captivity by Somali pirates--a riveting, thoughtful, and emotionally resonant exploration of foreign policy, religious extremism, and the costs of survival. In January 2012, having covered a Somali pirate trial in Hamburg for Spiegel Online International--and funded by a grant from the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting--Michael Scott Moore traveled to the Horn of Africa to write about piracy and ways to end it. In a terrible twist of fate, Moore himself was kidnapped and subsequently held captive by Somali pirates. Subjected to conditions that break even the strongest spirits--physical injury, starvation, isolation, terror--Moore's survival is a testament to his indomitable strength of mind. In September 2014, after 977 days, he walked free when his ransom was put together by the help of several US and German institutions, friends, colleagues, and his strong-willed mother. Yet Moore's own struggle is only part of the story: The Desert and the Sea falls at the intersection of reportage, memoir, and history. Caught between Muslim pirates, the looming threat of Al-Shabaab, and the rise of ISIS, Moore observes the worlds that surrounded him--the economics and history of piracy; the effects of post-colonialism; the politics of hostage negotiation and ransom; while also conjuring the various faces of Islam--and places his ordeal in the context of the larger political and historical issues. A sort of Catch-22 meets Black Hawk Down, The Desert and the Sea is written with dark humor, candor, and a journalist's clinical distance and eye for detail. Moore offers an intimate and otherwise inaccessible view of life as we cannot fathom it, brilliantly weaving his own experience as a hostage with the social, economic, religious, and political factors creating it. The Desert and the Sea is wildly compelling and a book that will take its place next to titles like Den of Lions and Even Silence Has an End.

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9781538552490

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Reviews

However much you wish Michael Scott Moore had never had cause to write it, this book could not be more engrossing, harrowing, suspenseful, wrenchingly humane, and illuminating. -- Francisco Goldman, author of Say Her Name His account of his nearly three years of captivity is a testament to the strength of one man's indomitable spirit and Moore's great gifts of observation, his evident gifts as a storyteller, his humor, and his wits. Thank heavens he lived to tell the story, which everyone should now read and cheer. -- Tom Barbash, author of Stay Up with Me Sweetness and Blood is a lively tour de force of travel writing and enterprising research that tells the truly fascinating story of surfing's spread into unlikely corners of the globe. This is like Beach Boys music for the sun-hungry brain, imagination, and soul. -- Francisco Goldman, author of The Art of Political Murder: Who Killed the Bishop If you read Michael Scott Moore's book, first clear your schedule, because you won't put it down until you've finished it. The Desert and the Sea is an astonishing and harrowing story, told with great humanity, by a writer who ventures where few will ever go. -- Susan Casey, author of Voices in the Ocean: A Journey into the Wild and Haunting World of Dolphins Highly addictive reading material. Michael Scott Moore delivers an amazing true-life thriller, one of the most suspenseful books written in recent years, that tracks across oceans and underworlds, culminating in a very rewarding, deeply profound end. -- Jeffrey Gettleman, Pulitzer Prize-winner and author of Love, Africa

Author Information

Michael Scott Moore is an accomplished author and journalist, a California native and a longtime resident of Berlin. His comic novel about L.A., Too Much of Nothing, was published in 2003, and Sweetness and Blood, a travel book about the spread of surfing to odd corners of the world, was named a book of the year by The Economist in 2010. Moore has written about politics, literature, and travel for The Atlantic, Der Spiegel, Pacific Standard, Bloomberg Businessweek, and the Los Angeles Review of Books. Corey Snow, a full-time audiobook narrator and voice actor living in the great Pacific Northwest, has been everything from a paratrooper to a software developer. Working from his studio in Olympia, Washington, he has recorded numerous audiobooks, including Crescent Lake by David Sakmyster and several titles in David Niall Wilson's DeChance Chronicles. Corey's love of reading and storytelling shows in every word, regardless of whether he is bringing characters from a novel to life, clearly detailing military history, or making software theory riveting.

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