Keenan's account of his captivity in Beirut, during which for much of the time he was shut off from all news and contact with his fellow-hostages.

An Evil Cradling

Keenan, Brian

Constitutional Law

VIKING

I'll Tell Me Ma: A Childhood Memoir

The story of an ordinary boy growing up in Belfast who would go on to become world-famous as a hostage in Beirut, and author of the extraordinary testimony of imprisonment and survival that was An Evil Cradling In this remarkable and equally moving act of retrieval, Brian Keenan has captured the vanished world of 1950s Belfast in all its vivid vernacular and grey, post-war austerity. This is a a city where westerns were showing every afternoon at the Picture Theatre, where livestock was still herded onto the docks and the shipyards flourished. It was also a place of ghosts: the plague dead in the cemeteries, the family dead in the scrapbooks, a witch's box discovered under the stairs, the giant street bonfires every 12th of July to commemorate the Battle of the Boyne. By the end of the book, after his father's death and his mother's Alzheimer's, Belfast itself becomes a ghost city to Brian Keenan, the boy who leaves to become a man. Rich in detail and atmosphere, this is an affectionate story of a disaffected childhood. At the center is a shy, self-conscious boy of unusual moral integrity; a boy puzzled by religion and sectarianism, in love with books and music and full of curiosity about the world outside.

Biographies & Memoirs

Historical

Vintage Digital

Brian Keenan went to Beirut in 1985 for a change of scene from his native Belfast. He became headline news when he was kidnapped by fundamentalist Shi'ite militiamen and held in the suburbs of Beirut for the next four and a half years. For much of that time he was shut off from all news and contact with anyone other than his jailers and, later, his fellow hostages, amongst them John McCarthy.

Blind Flight : An Evil Cradling

Sports & Outdoors

Vintage, UK

This brilliantly written account by a former Middle East hostage was a #1 bestseller in Britain and served as the inspiration for the acclaimed Broadway hit Someone Who'll Watch Over Me. "Conveys the surrealism of the ordeal, the loss of control and melting of identity that come with realizing you are a pawn in someone else's game."--Time.

An Evil Cradling: The Five-Year Ordeal of a Hostage

Penguin??Books

Turlough

Literature & Fiction

Contemporary

JONATHAN CAPE.

Local rather than international, the dramas and privations described in this memoir are not the stuff of headlines. This is the story of an ordinary boy growing up in Belfast after the war; an ordinary boy who would go on to become world-famous as a hostage in Beirut and author of the extraordinary testimony of imprisonment and survival that was An Evil Cradling. In this remarkable and equally moving act of retrieval, Brian Keenan has captured the vanished world of 1950s Belfast in all its vivid vernacular and gray, post-war austerity. This is a time of licorice and Airfix models, pigeon-fanciers, street vendors selling coal and bleach and herring, street-fighters with lions on chains—a city where westerns were showing every afternoon at the Picture Theater, where livestock was still herded onto the docks, and the shipyards flourished. It was also a place of ghosts: the plague dead in the cemeteries, the family dead in the scrapbooks, a witch's box discovered under the stairs, the giant street bonfires every 12th of July to commemorate the Battle of the Boyne. By the end of the book, after his father's death and his mother's Alzheimer's, Belfast itself becomes a ghost city to Brian Keenan, the boy who leaves to become a man. Rich in detail and atmosphere, I'll Tell Me Ma is an affectionate story of a disaffected childhood. At the center is a shy, self-conscious boy of unusual moral integrity; a boy puzzled by religion and sectarianism, in love with books and music and full of curiosity about the world outside. A book of reclamation, I'll Tell Me Ma is also a coming-to-terms with the past: a resounding, thrilling record of redemption.

RANDOM HOUSE UK

Four Quarters of Light

DOUBLEDAY

Between Extremes: A Journey Beyond Imagination

For four years, Brian Keenan and John McCarthy were incarcerated in a Lebanese dungeon. From the blank outlook of a tiny cell, with just each other and a few volumes of an ancient American encyclopaedia to sustain them, they could only wander the wide open spaces of their imagination. To displace the ugly confines of their existence, they imagined walking in the High Andes and across the wastes of Patagonia. Five years after their release, Brian and John chose to travel together again to see how the reality of Chile matched their imagination and to revisit their past experiences. Between Extremes is the story of that journey.

Between Extremes

Travel

McCarthy, John

Travel Writing

Transworld Publishers

Reference

Writing, Research & Publishing Guides

Transworld Publishers, Ltd

Brian Keenan's fascination with Alaska began as a small boy choosing his first library book in a Belfast school. The book was Jack London's wondrous Call of the Wild. And it has permeated Keenan's life ever since.A short visit to Fairbanks several years ago was enough to seal his connection with the place and he resolved to return. Last year he did so with a head full of questions about its inspiring landscape and heart informed with his own love of the desolate and barren places of the world. In the course of a journey that takes him through four geographical quarters from snowmelt in May to snowfall in September, he discovers a land as fantastical as a fairytale but whose vastness has a very peculiar type of allure.

Black Swan.

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Keenan, Brian. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Keenan, Brian