Moore’s account of his captivity in Somalia is a fascinating page-turner ... Moore’s honest writing will speak to readers; he is candid about his feelings, his mistakes, Somalia, his conditions, and his pirates. He walks the tightrope of inviting readers to have empathy for pirates whose national history includes brutal colonialism while demonstrating the pirates’ capacity for torture ... Having faced an experience no one ever should, Moore constructs a narrative that makes readers’ hearts beat faster and with purpose.
Moore’s talent for dark observational humor is used to great effect and leavens what might, in another writer’s hands, have been a relentlessly bleak book ... Moore did not die for his story, but he suffered deeply and helplessly. Yet the book Moore has written, while clearly not the one he would’ve chosen, provides rare insight into Somali piracy and is an important addition to that most traumatic and illuminating genre of nonfiction, the hostage memoir.
A harrowing and affecting account of two and a half years of captivity at the hands of Somali pirates ... There’s plenty of gallows humor as Moore settles in for his long spell of unhappiness ... A deftly constructed and tautly told rejoinder to Robert Louis Stevenson’s Kidnapped, sympathetic but also sharp-edged.
