If You Can Make the Time : "Taken on Trust" by Terry Waite

From the back cover :

I had heard of the underground prisons of Beirut: The Lebanese Gulag as Terry Anderson described them. There were stories of prisoners being incarcerated for years in such places.

I sat down again and began to prepare myself for an ordeal. First, I would strengthen my will by fasting; I would refuse all food for at least a week. Secondly, I would make three resolutions to support me through whatever was to come: no regrets, no false sentimentality, no self-pity.

Then I did what generations of prisoners have done before me. I stood up and, bending my head, I began walking round and round and round and round.

From the inside cover :

 

Above all, it was his recollection of times past, of his life from childhood onward, which gave him the will to keep going. He relives in his memory his humble upbringing as the son of the village policeman in Styal, Cheshire, his early career in the Church Army, his years in the dangerous role of advisor to the first African archbishop in Idi Amin’s Uganda, his work in Rome as a consultant to religious communities, and—during his time as the Archbishop of Canterbury's envoy—his gradual emergence on the world stage as one of the most remarkable figures of his generation. A humanitarian in his own right, he became a negotiator over the plight of the hostages in Tehran and Libya—he describes his meetings with Colonel Gaddafi—and finally with the kidnappers of the Beirut hostages. He explains his ever-increasing involvement with others on all sides, including Oliver North and George Bush, until that fateful day in January 1987 when he himself was “taken on trust” and became a captive. 

This deeply moving autobiography, with its Kafkaesque sequence of events and taut narrative, is destined to become one of the classic accounts of man’s survival at the limits of human endurance.