Free Republic

Bored with her life and fresh off a New Year’s Eve epiphany, a 24-year-old Canadian named Amanda Lindhout quits her job as a cocktail waitress and decides to become a journalist. To get famous fast, she’ll start in Afghanistan, landing in Kabul in May 2007. She moves on to Iraq in January 2008, and is held hostage for several hours in Sadr City before paying off her captors. “Affirming that I have the world in the palm of my hand,” she has written in her journal. Amanda has no training and is using “TV Reporting for Dummies” as her manual....

Amanda Lindhout traveled to Somalia hoping to find a story that would launch her career as a television reporter. Four days after arriving in the country with a photographer friend, both were taken hostage by Islamist insurgents. While in captivity, she was “starved, beaten and sexually brutalized” according to her memoir of the 2008 saga set to be released next month... Lindhout spent fifteen months “of harrowing captivity” after being pulled from the car in which she was traveling by a group of masked men. During her 460-day ordeal, the aspiring reporter converted to Islam in order not to be...