At Your Own Risk: An American Chronicle of Crisis and Capitivity in the Middle East

In 1985, Tom Sutherland, dean of agriculture at the American University of Beirut (and formerly a dean at Colorado State University), was seized by Islamic Jihad terrorists. His wife, Jean, a teacher and administrator at AUB, spent six and a half years working for his release, traveling back and forth from Beirut to Washington, meeting with Bush, Reagan, George Schultz and other politicians involved in the hostage crisis. In captivity, Tom shared tiny, dank spaces with an ever-shifting roster of fellow hostages, among them Terry Anderson and Terry Waite. Tormented by his captors, he kept his sanity through meditation, reading and conversation. Told in alternating chapters by Tom and Jean, and interspersed with diary excerpts, this vivid, harrowing account of their ordeal offers a close-up of Lebanon, a cauldron of Christian, Muslim and Druze clashes, Syrian incursions, Pan-Arabism and Palestinian refugee camps. After Tom's release in 1991, the Sutherlands returned to Colorado and Tom became a professional speaker. (Apr.)