The Hostage's Daughter

August 8, 2016
Journalist Anderson sets out to learn the truth about the 1985 kidnapping of her father, Terry Anderson, who was held captive for six years by the Islamic Jihad Organization (IJO), an event that defined her life and impaired their relationship. She sets out to learn about the men who took her father and “how a person becomes a terrorist.” The resulting journey is a perilous and riveting spiral into Middle Eastern politics, exploring the dawn of the terrorist era in Beirut. At the center of her story is the question of Hezbollah’s complicity and the possibility of an IJO double agent dealing secretly with Israel. She speaks with U.S. counterterrorism experts Barbara Bodine and Robert Oakley, an infamous former plane hijacker, and her father’s fellow kidnappee Terry Waite, before coming face-to-face with someone uniquely qualified to answer her questions and provide the closure she so desperately seeks. Anderson intersperses her personal story, meeting her father for the first time at age seven, through a host of personal crises, and the redemptive powers she found in her chosen career. Through these dual narratives, Anderson creates a compelling depiction of the collateral damage of terrorism and a remarkable piece of investigative journalism with a surprise twist. Though we never get a full picture of her strained relationship with her father, that may be the point—there isn’t much to tell. Agent: Lindsay Edgecombe, Levine Greenberg Rostan Literary Agency.

May 15, 2016

Clancy is a Moth GrandSlam winner who's been featured on NPR's Snap Judgment and this year's season finale of Girls and whose writing has appeared widely. Here she tells the story of her rough-and-tumble Queens, NY, upbringing, giving raucous, vibrant, shout-out-loud voice to urban working-class women. Then there are the Hamptons interludes facilitated by her mother's boyfriend.

Copyright 2016 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

A firsthand view of conflict in the Middle East.In 1985, Shiite militia in Lebanon kidnapped Associated Press reporter Terry Anderson and held him hostage for the next six years. It wasn't until his release in 1991 that his daughter, the author, met him for the first time, and ever after the relationship was fraught. He suffered from PTSD and was emotionally unavailable, "numb and dismissive," while, to judge by this memoir, his daughter was emotionally needy and made her fair share of poor decisions. Drug abuse, abusive boyfriends, mental illness: all are aspects of "the legacy of trauma I was born with." Though the author's point is well-taken that political acts have reverberating consequences that affect people far away from the main stage, her narrative is always less interesting when the focus is on her. Her father is another matter; though clearly flawed and wounded, he emerges as a player in a political drama of a complex, sometimes nearly incomprehensible character. Anderson is at her best when she teases apart the narrative's many threads, which number not just Hezbollah, but also the broader community of Shiite Islam, to say nothing of Israeli intelligence, the CIA, Iran, and other actors in set pieces such as the Beirut embassy bombing. The author's vigorous on-the-ground investigation of these matters, talking with sometimes-shadowy and seldom pleasant operatives, redeems the book from its self-absorbed excesses. The narrative is also timely; though some of the cast has changed, Anderson's depiction of the relationship between Lebanese civilians and Syrian refugees, say, shows how enmities and alliances in the region have taken years to form. Ultimately, it's a solid but not groundbreaking contribution to understanding the multifaceted tensions of a region that seems willfully resistant to peace. A middling book, much of it a footnote to an event that's already well-receded into history, even though it is part of a larger conflict still unfolding. COPYRIGHT(1) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

August 15, 2016
A firsthand view of conflict in the Middle East.In 1985, Shiite militia in Lebanon kidnapped Associated Press reporter Terry Anderson and held him hostage for the next six years. It wasnt until his release in 1991 that his daughter, the author, met him for the first time, and ever after the relationship was fraught. He suffered from PTSD and was emotionally unavailable, numb and dismissive, while, to judge by this memoir, his daughter was emotionally needy and made her fair share of poor decisions. Drug abuse, abusive boyfriends, mental illness: all are aspects of the legacy of trauma I was born with. Though the authors point is well-taken that political acts have reverberating consequences that affect people far away from the main stage, her narrative is always less interesting when the focus is on her. Her father is another matter; though clearly flawed and wounded, he emerges as a player in a political drama of a complex, sometimes nearly incomprehensible character. Anderson is at her best when she teases apart the narratives many threads, which number not just Hezbollah, but also the broader community of Shiite Islam, to say nothing of Israeli intelligence, the CIA, Iran, and other actors in set pieces such as the Beirut embassy bombing. The authors vigorous on-the-ground investigation of these matters, talking with sometimes-shadowy and seldom pleasant operatives, redeems the book from its self-absorbed excesses. The narrative is also timely; though some of the cast has changed, Andersons depiction of the relationship between Lebanese civilians and Syrian refugees, say, shows how enmities and alliances in the region have taken years to form. Ultimately, its a solid but not groundbreaking contribution to understanding the multifaceted tensions of a region that seems willfully resistant to peace. A middling book, much of it a footnote to an event thats already well-receded into history, even though it is part of a larger conflict still unfolding.

COPYRIGHT(2016) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

September 1, 2016
In this well-reported memoir, the journalist daughter of former hostage Terry Anderson effectively weaves together the personal and the political. She simultaneously investigates her father's abductioninterviewing key players, including a man she came to believe was one of her father's abductorsand examines its effect on her life. Her Lebanese mother was pregnant, and her father was still married to the mother of his other daughter when militant Shiite Muslims kidnapped him in Beirut in 1985. Anderson didn't meet her dad until she was 7 and he was finally released. When she was 15, she was awarded $6 million in frozen Iranian assets held in the U.S. and her parents got $40 million, but money did not buy happiness. Anderson indulges in drugs and promiscuity; her dad, suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, squanders his fortune; and her parents divorce. It's easy to imagine a movie version of this drama, which is spiked with Anderson's criticism of Israel as well as her father's captors and which ends with her in Brooklyn, wondering if she should return to Beirut.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2016, American Library Association.)