Guantanamo: My Journey by David HicksMy rating: 4 of 5 stars
Many people say of David Hicks, 'Well what was he doing in Afghanistan?' implying that he deserved his imprisonment. You only have to read the introduction to this book to understand that that's not the point — it was the conditions of his imprisonment, which nobody deserves.
After the intro, the book's early chapters deal with his childhood and young manhood. They're very readable. It becomes perfectly clear that he was just a young bloke in search of travel and adventure, not a terrorist by any means. There was a lot of mis-reporting at the time.
The chapters about Guantanamo are not sensationalised — they don't have to be. The mere facts are horrific. The man — along with many others — was tortured for years. Astonishing that he survived, albeit not unscathed. It's a book that needed to be written, a personal story with much wider implications.
Hicks dabbled in writing from an early age, and the book is well-written.
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