Ordeal

Thanks to Chris at the good ship Explananda, I spent a decent portion of last evening riveted by a harrowing account of journalist Scott Taylor's abduction by members of Ansar Al Islam, Five Days in Hell.

I don't admire Taylor's political views, but I do admire his courage, and his pithy writing - and he writes well enough that his own political commitments don't color or vitiate the sheer drama of the story. It's a good read for its own sake, and provides a very interesting window into the capricious moral psychology of Islamists: Middle Eastern etiquette alongside sadism and brutality, one morphing in manic fashion into the other, then back again. His constant 11th-hour reprieves from "execution" remind one of Dostoyevsky.

Read it.