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A review by vcallgood
My Guantanamo Diary: The Detainees and the Stories They Told Me by Mahvish Rukhsana Khan
4.0
I read this on accident. Let me explain: I am trying to complete Book Riot’s 2019 Read Harder Challenge, and one of the tasks is to read a book written in prison. This is definitely not in my wheelhouse, so I took to the goodreads group for recs. I kept seeing “Guantanamo Diary” recommended, so I checked its availability at my library, and this book popped up. You can see how I might have thought it was the one I was looking for.
I eventually realized this book was not written in prison, and there is ANOTHER book called “Guantanamo Diary” written by a detainee. But I was already hooked. She does such a beautiful job conveying the brutality and harsh conditions these men were living under while maintaining their dignity and honor. I had very little understanding of what really went on at GITMO under the Bush administration, or how the war on terror was run. This was devastating, heartbreaking, and eye opening. She does such a great job of presenting facts without vilifying any groups in their entirety.
A main take away from this book for me is that there are evil people on all sides of a conflict just as there are innocents, and when we blur the line between evil and innocence just because of a person’s race, nationality, or religious preference, we run the risk of perpetrating great evil ourselves.
I eventually realized this book was not written in prison, and there is ANOTHER book called “Guantanamo Diary” written by a detainee. But I was already hooked. She does such a beautiful job conveying the brutality and harsh conditions these men were living under while maintaining their dignity and honor. I had very little understanding of what really went on at GITMO under the Bush administration, or how the war on terror was run. This was devastating, heartbreaking, and eye opening. She does such a great job of presenting facts without vilifying any groups in their entirety.
A main take away from this book for me is that there are evil people on all sides of a conflict just as there are innocents, and when we blur the line between evil and innocence just because of a person’s race, nationality, or religious preference, we run the risk of perpetrating great evil ourselves.