The Tightening Dark
An American Hostage in Yemen
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- USD 14.99
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- USD 14.99
Descripción editorial
This riveting memoir follows a Lebanese-Muslim-American and thirty-year US Marine veteran who suffered a six-month ordeal at the hands of a brutal regime in Yemen—and remained loyal to his country through it all.
As air strikes carpeted Yemen's capital, Sam Farran was one of only a few Americans in the war-ravaged country. He was there to conduct security assessments for a variety of international firms. Days after his arrival, he was brutally seized and taken hostage by Houthi rebels. Sam would spend the next six months suffering a horrific ordeal that would test his endurance, his loyalty and his very soul.
Every day his captors asked him—as a fellow Muslim—to betray America and his Marine heritage in exchange for his freedom. Would he give in to the Houthis and return to his Middle Eastern roots? In the end--and despite daily threats to his life—Sam found the strength to resist, and came out of his ordeal with an increased sense of being, foremost, a US Marine.
The Tightening Dark is an intimate, riveting and inspiring memoir of heroic strength, courage, survival and commitment to country. And a reminder that the best parts of the American dream are the dreamers—those who pledge to being American, regardless of where they are born.
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Farran, a former U.S. Marine turned private security contractor, debuts with an in-depth account of the six months he spent in a Yemeni prison in 2015. Born in a small village in Lebanon, Farran joined the Marines after graduating from high school in Dearborn, Mich., and served as an interrogator for the Defense Intelligence Agency and a defense attaché at the U.S. embassy in Yemen, where he ran a program to train the country's Counterterrorism Unit, or CTU, after 9/11. Following the takeover of the Yemeni government by Houthi rebels in 2014, Farran, who had returned to the country to do a security assessment for British American Tobacco, was kidnapped by members of the CTU and accused of coordinating air strikes on behalf of the Saudi Arabian–led coalition fighting the Houthis. Detained in an "American-built jail on an American-funded base built to combat al-Qaeda," Farran faced weekly beatings and interrogations while his family and colleagues desperately sought information about his whereabouts. He credits his military training and Muslim faith with helping him to survive the ordeal, which ended when the Omani government negotiated his release. Though the narrative drags in places, Farran offers insightful details about the complex situation in Yemen and the larger forces at play in the Middle East. This is an illuminating look behind the headlines.