The Miss Stone Affair
America's First Modern Hostage Crisis
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- $12.99
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
In The Miss Stone Affair, Teresa Carpenter re-creates the drama of the country’s first modern hostage crisis—an event that captured the attention of the world, dominated American and European headlines, and posed a dilemma for incoming president Theodore Roosevelt.
On September 3, 1901, a Protestant missionary named Ellen Stone set out on horseback for a trek across the mountainous hinterlands of Balkan Macedonia. In a narrow gorge, she was attacked by a band of masked men who carried her off the road and, more significantly, onto the path of history. Stone would become the first American captured for ransom on foreign soil.
Using a wealth of contemporary correspondence and diplomatic cables, Teresa Carpenter tells the story of Miss Stone through narrative that is suspenseful, harrowing, and at times even comical.
On a journey that takes the reader from Boston's Beacon Hill to Constantinople and the bloody revolution-wracked nation-states of the Balkans, Carpenter introduces an unforgettable cast of characters: the strong-willed Miss Stone and her Bulgarian companion, Katerina Tsilka, who is brought along by the kidnappers—in deference to Victorian convention—as a chaperone; the terrorists who threaten to murder their hostages and yet are awed when Tsilka gives birth to a baby girl; the diplomat who sees the Stone case as a vehicle for his personal ambition; rival negotiators whom the terrorists pit one against the other; a media mogul obsessed with finding the hostages and securing their literary rights; and, of course, the new president, Theodore Roosevelt, who must decide if he should, as many of his countrymen are demanding, send warships to the Near East or if some quieter form of intervention might win the day.
Teresa Carpenter has produced a turn-of-the-century international thriller with precision, drama, and historical perspective. This is a story for our time.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Zooming in on a historical footnote, the kidnapping of an American missionary by Macedonian revolutionaries in 1901, Carpenter discovers a Byronic adventure and an early lesson in the perils of international power for the U.S. Ellen Stone was a committed evangelical missionary and an indomitable adventurer who became, says Carpenter, "a law unto herself" in the unstable and newly autonomous Bulgaria, which Carpenter describes as "a nominal Ottoman principality, an American-style democracy, and a Russian client state." In Macedonia, ethnic Bulgarians still ruled by Turks formed a guerrilla resistance, partly financed by brigandage. A rogue band of these revolutionaries seized Stone and another hostage, a local Protestant convert, who was five months pregnant. American involvement was delayed by William McKinley's assassination, just days after the abduction. But Stone's predicament naturally lent itself to sensational media coverage and soon became a cause c l bre, prompting a fund-raising drive to collect the hefty ransom demanded by her captors. With America's limited diplomatic presence in the Balkans, the tangled political agendas of the regional leaders, and the secrecy of the Macedonian guerrillas, the negotiations involved murky, back-channel dealings and hidden subtexts, which Carpenter skillfully delineates. Carpenter a Pulitzer Prize winning reporter, former senior editor of the Village Voice, and author of Mob Girl might have deepened her exploration of the historical issues at stake: the consequences of Ottoman decline and American ascendance. She might even have indulged the melodramatic potential of the tale more. Still, it's a gripping yarn, even in her straightforward account. Photos, map.
