Guantánamo Diary (eBook)

Mohamedou Ould Slahi was born in Mauritania in 1970. He earned a scholarship to study engineering in Germany when he was 18, and lived and worked in Germany and briefly in Canada before returning to Mauritania in 2000. He has been detained in Guantánamo Bay since August 2002. Larry Siems directed the Freedom to Write and International Programs at PEN American Center, where he led PEN's ongoing efforts to defend writers facing persecution around the world and protect freedom of expression in the US. He left at the end of 2013 to concentrate on editing Slahi's memoir. He is the author of The Torture Report and is a poet and non-fiction writer.

A harrowing account of [Mohamedou Ould Slahi's] detention, interrogation, and abuse . . . One of the most stubborn, deliberate and cruel Guant�namo interrogations on record

Slahi's book offers a reminders that the struggles we face in these difficult times involve real individuals, not faceless creatures who are to be characterised as members as one or other hated group. That he has resorted to words, the mightiest of weapons, even as his incarceration continues, makes his experience all the more relevant today

A necessary book

Anyone who reads Guantanamo Diary - and every American with a shred of conscience should do so, now - will be ashamed and appalled. Mohamedou Ould Slahi's demand for simple justice should be our call to action. Because what's at stake in this case is not just the fate of one man who managed, against all odds, to tell his story, but the future of our democracy

Gripping . . . extraordinary . . . Mr. Slahi emerges from the pages of his diary, handwritten in 2005, as a curious and generous personality, observant, witty and devout

Compelling

Unsentimental, occasionally funny yet always temperate

Slahi's ordeal is at the heart of Guantánamo Diary, but the book is about much more. It is a chilling story of the United States' worst abuses in the post-9/11 era. It is an account of other countries' complicity in these abuses. It is a terrible example of what happens to innocent people when the rule of law is suspended. In the words of Larry Siems, the book's editor, it is "an epic for our times"

This is a necessary book. It reminds us that the evil we're fighting can be found in ourselves as well as our enemies

Necessary reading for those seeking to understand the dangers that Guantanamo's continued existence poses to Americans in the world . . . a fluent, engaging and at times eloquent writer even in his fourth language of English

Un-nerving yet ultimately magnificent . . . there is something special about Guantánamo Diary that lifts it from human-rights polemic to the realm of literary magic

A vision of hell, beyond Orwell, beyond Kafka.

The fact that you are able to read his account of his time in America's most notorious prison is a testimony to his intelligence, his entrepreneurial spirit and determination

Guantanamo Diary . . .will leave you shell-shocked

The work is a kind of dark masterpiece, a sometimes unbearable epic of pain, anguish and bitter humour that the Dostoyevsky of The House of the Dead would have recognized and embraced

Extraordinary

Heartbreaking . . . there has never been a book quite like this . . . extraordinary and overwhelming

A sobering, often chilling, read. Slahi's story deserves to be widely read

An extraordinary account . . . the global war on terror has found in a Mauritanian captive its true and complete witness

Slahi is an intelligent and sensitive writer whose sense of irony somehow survived along with his sanity

An essential read

This Guantánamo detainee's harrowing memoir is a tremendous achievement - and a grave warning against ignoring the rule of law