Proof of Life
Twenty Days on the Hunt for a Missing Person in the Middle East
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- $13.99
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- $13.99
Publisher Description
“Riveting . . . Well-written and highly compelling."—Wall Street Journal
“Truly thrilling. Daniel Levin brilliantly conveys both the menace and the evil of Middle Eastern intrigue, and some victories of human kindness over cruelty and despair.”—Daniel Kahneman, New York Times bestselling author of Thinking, Fast and Slow
Daniel Levin was in his New York office when he got a call from an acquaintance with an urgent, cryptic request to meet in Paris. A young man had gone missing in Syria. No government, embassy, or intelligence agency would help. Could he? Would he? So begins a suspenseful, shocking, and at times brutal true story of one man’s search to find a missing person in Syria over twenty tense days. Levin, a lawyer turned armed-conflict negotiator, chases leads throughout the Middle East, meeting with powerful sheikhs, drug lords, and sex traffickers in his pursuit of the truth.
In Proof of Life, Levin dives deep into the shadows—an underground industry of war where everything is for sale, including arms, drugs, and even people. He offers a fascinating study of how people use leverage to get what they want from one another and of a place where no one does a favor without wanting something in return, whether it’s immediately or years down the road.
A fast-paced thriller wrapped in a memoir, Proof of Life is a cinematic must-read by an author with access to a world that usually remains hidden.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Levin (Nothing But a Circus), a board member of the Liechtenstein Foundation for State Governance, delivers an uneven account of his efforts to find an American who'd disappeared in Syria. In 2014, a business associate asked Levin to look into the case of a young man (here identified by the alias Paul Blocher) who had set out for Aleppo with the intention of assisting a group of volunteer doctors. Fearing that his son had been kidnapped, Blocher's father decided to keep his name out of the press and work through private channels to resolve the situation. Levin, who had been involved in a project to mediate between warring factions in Syria and identify individuals for postwar leadership roles, agreed to make use of his contacts to locate Blocher. In his meandering account of the nearly three-week search, Blocher's plight sometimes recedes into the background, as when Levin recounts his intervention to save a cook's job after a boorish hotel guest demanded his firing. There are ample details about other cases of kidnapped Westerners in the Middle East and vivid profiles of regional power brokers, smugglers, and funders of terrorism, but Levin's reconstructed dialogue occasionally rings false and the discovery of Blocher's fate is somewhat anticlimactic. This would-be thriller disappoints.
