Brian Keenan

An evil cradling

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. Brian Keenan has captured the vanished world of 1950s Belfast in all its vivid vernacular and grey, post-war austerity. I'll Tell Me Ma is an affectionate story of a disaffected childhood. At the centre 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. It is also a book about coming-to-terms with the past: a resounding, thrilling record of redemption.

A Childhood Memoir

I'll Tell Me Ma

John McCarthy

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

Brian Keenan's fascination with Alaska began as a small boy while reading Jack London's wondrous CALL OF THE WILD. With a head full of questions about its inspiring landscape and a heart informed by his love of desolate and barren places, Brian Keenan sets out for Alaska to discover its four geographical quarters from snowmelt in May to snowfall in September, and en route, finds a land as fantastical as a fairytale but whose vastness has a very peculiar type of allure... From dog-mushing on a frozen lake beneath the whirling colours of the aurora borealis to camping in a two dollar tent in the tundra of the arctic circle, Brian Keenan seeks out the ultimate wilderness experience and along the way, encounters hard-core survivalists who know what struggle and endurance mean from their daily battle with nature to exist. He discovers that true wilderness is as much a state of mind as it is a place. And ultimately to make Alaska home, one must surrender to the land.

Brian Keenan

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