"Murat Kurnaz, a Turkish citizen and resident of Germany, had been traveling in Pakistan in December 2001 when he was detained on his way to the airport and handed over to the U.S. military. He was 19 years old. After a couple of agonizing months in Kandahar, he was sent, shackled and hooded, to Guantanamo and imprisoned there for almost five years, despite the fact that both U.S. and German intelligence... Washington Post Book Review (read the entire Washington Post review) had concluded as early as 2002 that there was no evidence linking him to terrorism.

Kurnaz's account of his imprisonment is almost unbearably painful to read, precisely because his tone is so measured and low-key. He endured beatings, waterboarding, electric shock, isolation and the disruption of all sense of time and space. He was asked the same meaningless questions again and again. There were also petty, gratuitous cruelties: In Kandahar, prisoners were fed military Meals Ready to Eat (MREs) but with part of the food removed so that they were perpetually hungry. On one occasion, Kurnaz's MRE contained pork, which he, as a Muslim, could not eat. When a fellow prisoner, a boy of about 16, offered to share his own meager ration of chicken, soldiers rushed in to hit him.

There was little apparent concern in Kandahar over whether prisoners lived or died. One night Kurnaz saw a man being kicked and beaten to death by seven guards. Kurnaz himself was hoisted by a chain from the ceiling and left there for about five days, during which he observed another man hanging like himself and concluded, after some time, that this man was dead: 'His body was mostly swollen and blue, although in some places it was pale and white. I could see a lot of blood in his face, dark streams of it.'

The circumstances in Guantanamo were not much better. At one point, Kurnaz was joined in his cage by Abdul, a young man whose legs had been amputated in Bagram because of frostbite, and whose stumps still oozed blood and pus. Despite his constant pain, Abdul was treated as brutally as the other prisoners; when he clutched the fence in an attempt to hoist himself onto the bucket that served as a latrine, a guard hit his hands with a club.

Perhaps the worst part of the tortures Kurnaz describes is that there was no respite from them, no time to recuperate between beatings and interrogations, no uninterrupted sleep. For years he saw neither stars nor sunlight.

It is tempting to think of Kurnaz's story as exaggerated, but almost everything he describes jibes with the reports of other detainees and of human rights groups. This is a book politicians should read, and it should inspire anguished soul-searching among the rest of us.

John Rechy's story begins when, as a youngster, he encountered a notorious and strikingly beautiful woman at his sister's wedding. He learned that she was a kept woman. This glimpse of someone who lived without apology outside social norms inspired him for the rest of his life.

Rechy first gained prominence in 1963 with a novel called 'City of Night,' a heartfelt and poeticized account of life in the shadow world of pimps and gay hustlers. Coming in an era when rebels and outsiders — particularly as personified by beautiful and sexually ambiguous young men — were popular icons, the novel received a great deal of attention and acclaim. To some extent, Rechy is working the same soil here, and using the same heightened prose. Unfocused at first, his memoir flashes into life when he begins describing his own years as a street hustler, always accepting the touch of other men but never reciprocating — in short, having become the kind of impermeable icon he imagines the kept woman to have been. The writing in this book sometimes feels a little dated, but Rechy tells a good and occasionally insightful story.

Juliet Wittman teaches writing at the University of Colorado."

Reviewed by Juliet Wittman, Washington Post Book World (Copyright 2006 Washington Post Book World Service/Washington Post Writers Group)
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"The most compassionate, truthful and dignified account of the disgrace of Guantanamo that you are ever likely to read." --John le Carré "I thank God that  Murat kept his sanity in the hell of injustice and torture of nearly 5 years in Guantanamo so he could tell his story. May it be studied in every school and college in Europe and the USA. May it help to close down all the illegal and secret prisons and camps, as well as Guantanamo, and restore the prisoners to their families. I am sure Murat's book will educate a whole generation about justice and the defense of human rights." -- Vanessa Redgrave "Like many of the men imprisoned in Guantánamo, Murat Kurnaz was held for years without proper charge or trial. After intensive campaigning by his friends, family and Amnesty International members all over the world, he was finally released. This book is a profound and detailed account of his experiences. After suffering torture and detention without trial, it is testament to great strength of character that he is able to tell his story with such power and clarity." — Kate Allen, Director, Amnesty International UK

"Murat makes the horrors and inanities of Guantánamo so real; his voice is by turns young and headstrong, wry and wise. Murat's mother came to the Unites States to hear our first Guantánamo case argued before the Supreme Court back in 2004 - when I met her, I didn't know whether she would ever see her son again.  Now he is home safe and has produced this riveting and moving account of his torture and abuse at the hands of the U.S. government to shine a light in a dark place and try to help all those still languishing without hope.  This is a must read." -- Michael Ratner, President of the Center for Constitutional Rights and attorney representing the Guantánamo detainees.

"Kurnaz recounts his woes, and those of his fellow prisoners, with modesty and compassion. . . . He has written a measured and readable account, which is often even humorous in a Swiftian sort of way." — The Economist

"A vital document that should - rightly - shock and appall." -- Kirkus Reviews"A plainspoken account, Five Years of My Life focuses on the daily humiliations and surreal texture of life at Guantanamo" - Mother Jones

"May well represent our best hope yet of preserving the truth about this depraved chapter in American history...Kurnaz describes the varied tortures to which he was subjected for the next five years with such a level-headed lack of self-pity that they come across as neither bitter rallying cry nor unbearable litany of torment. In his gentle, understated way, Kurnaz describes the reality behind the euphemisms used to describe the 'enhanced interrogation practices' the Bush administration has openly authorized in the 'war on terror'." —  The Santa Barbara Independant

"This is a book politicians should read, and should inspire anguished soul-searching among the rest of us." — The Washington Post“Kurnaz…avoids sensationalism for a harrowing record of barbarities carried out in the name of democracy…[written] in stark, unadorned prose, with no scores to settle, knowing that his account is beyond most peoples imagination.” -- The Guardian (UK) "Kurnaz reveals Guantanamo shorn of media spin." — The Guardian (UK) "[An] indispensable document" — The Washington Post