Monday's Reviews Today: Inside Guantánamo & A Trucker Who Loses His Sight

by Staff, PW Daily -- Publishers Weekly, 6/30/2006

Sneak peeks of next week's reviews: In a memoir which is sure to spark political controversy, Moazzam Begg—a British-born Muslim, of Pakistani descent, who was teaching in Afghanistan when the war broke out—tells of his abduction and then secret detainment by the U.S. at Guantánamo in Enemy Combatant: My Imprisonment at Guantánamo, Bagram, and Kandahar. And, following a character in a different sort of prison, novelist Mark Powers explores the strange and complicated fate of a young trucker in The Echo Maker who, after surviving an accident on the road, emerges from a coma with a strange neurological disorder that bars him from connecting what he sees and thinks with what he feels.

Enemy Combatant: My Imprisonment at Guantánamo, Bagram, and Kandahar
Moazzam Begg. New Press, $26.95 (416p) ISBN 1-59558-136-7

In a fast-paced, harrowing narrative that's likely to become a flash point for the right and the left, Begg tells of his secret abduction by U.S. forces in Pakistan, his detainment at American air bases for more than a year and at Guantánamo for two more years as an enemy combatant. A British Muslim of Pakistani descent, Begg grew up in Birmingham and excelled at school before becoming involved with Islamic political causes and later moving to Afghanistan to become a teacher. After fighting broke out in Kabul, he and his wife and children moved to Islamabad in 2001, where U.S. operatives seized him. In March 2004, Begg was released from Guantánamo under pressure from the British government, but over the objections of the Pentagon, which still considers him a potential terrorist. Despite considerable media speculation over what Begg may have left out of this memoir, it's a forcefully told, up-to-the-minute political story. Whether Begg is describing his Muslim and Asian friends fighting white supremacist skinhead street gangs in Birmingham, or telling how he shared poetry with a U.S. guard at Guantánamo, his tone is assured. His work will be necessary reading for people on all sides of the issue. (Sept.)

The Echo Maker
Richard Powers. Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $25 (464p) ISBN 0-374-14635-7

A truck jackknifes off an "arrow straight country road" near Kearney, Nebr., in Powers's ninth novel, becoming the catalyst for a painstakingly rendered minuet of self-reckoning. The accident puts the truck's 27-year-old driver, Mark Schluter, into a 14-day coma. When he emerges, he is stricken with Capgras syndrome: he's unable to match his visual and intellectual identifications with his emotional ones. He thinks his sister, Karin, isn't actually his sister—she's an imposter (the same goes for Mark's house). A shattered and worried Karin turns to Gerald Weber, an Oliver Sacks–like figure who writes bestsellers about neurological cases, but Gerald's inability to help Mark, and bad reviews of his latest book, cause him to wonder if he has become a "neurological opportunist." Then there are the mysteries of Mark's nurse's aide, Barbara Gillespie, who is secretive about her past and seems to be much more intelligent than she's willing to let on, and the meaning of a cryptic note left on Mark's nightstand the night he was hospitalized. MacArthur fellow Powers masterfully charts the shifting dynamics of Karin's and Mark's relationship, and his prose—powerful, but not overbearing—brings a sorrowful energy to every page. (Oct.)

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