Michael Scott Moore, a journalist and the writer of Sweetness and Blood, incorporates personal narrative and rigorous investigative journalism with this profound and revelatory memoir of his three-year captivity by Somali pirates-a riveting, thoughtful, and emotionally resonant exploration of foreign policy, spiritual extremism, and the costs of survival.

In January 2012, having protected a Somali pirate trial in Hamburg for Spiegel Online International-and funded with a grant through the Pulitzer about The Desert and the ocean: 977 Days Captive over the Somali Pirate Coast Center on Problems Reporting-Michael Scott Moore traveled to the Horn of Africa to create about piracy and ways to end it. In a terrible twist of fate, Moore himself was kidnapped and subsequently kept captive by Somali pirates. Put through conditions that break also the most powerful spirits-physical injury, starvation, isolation, terror-Moore’s survival is definitely a testament to his indomitable strength of brain. In September 2014, after 977 days, he walked free when his ransom was put together by the help of several US and German organizations, friends, co-workers, and his strong-willed mother.

Yet Moore’s own struggle is part of the tale: The Desert and the Sea falls on the intersection of reportage, memoir, and background. Captured between Muslim pirates, the looming threat of Al-Shabaab, as well as the rise of ISIS, Moore observes the worlds that surrounded him-the economics and background of piracy; the consequences of post-colonialism; the politics of hostage negotiation and ransom; while also conjuring the various encounters of Islam-and places his ordeal in the framework of the bigger political and historical issues.

A sort of Capture-22 meets Dark Hawk Down, The Desert and the ocean is written with dark humor, candor, and a journalist’s clinical distance and eye for detail. Moore provides an close and in any other case inaccessible watch of existence as we cannot fathom it, brilliantly weaving his own experience being a hostage using the interpersonal, economic, spiritual, and political factors creating it. The Desert and the ocean is wildly powerful and a publication that will take its place next to game titles like Den of Lions as well as Silence Comes with an End.