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    The Pirates of Somalia: Inside Their Hidden World
    Unavailable
    The Pirates of Somalia: Inside Their Hidden World
    Unavailable
    The Pirates of Somalia: Inside Their Hidden World
    Audiobook8 hours

    The Pirates of Somalia: Inside Their Hidden World

    Written by Jay Bahadur

    Narrated by Sunil Malhotra

    3.5/5

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this audiobook

    Somalia, on the tip of the Horn of Africa, has been inhabited as far back as 9,000 BC. Its history is as rich as the country is old. Caught up in a decades-long civil war, Somalia, along with Iraq and Afghanistan, has become one of the most dangerous countries in the world. Getting there from North America is a forty-five-hour, five-flight voyage through Frankfurt, Dubai, Djibouti, Bossaso (on the Gulf of Aden), and, finally, Galkayo. Somalia is a place where a government has been built out of anarchy.

    For centuries, stories of pirates have captured imaginations around the world. The recent bands of daring, ragtag pirates off the coast of Somalia, hijacking multimillion-dollar tankers owned by international shipping conglomerates, have brought the scourge of piracy into the modern era.

    The capture of the American-crewed cargo ship Maersk Alabama in April 2009, the first United States ship to be hijacked in almost two centuries, catapulted the Somali pirates onto prime-time news. Then, with the horrific killing by Somali pirates of four Americans, two of whom had built their dream yacht and were sailing around the world ("And now on to: Angkor Wat! And Burma!" they had written to friends), the United States Navy, Special Operation Forces, FBI, Justice Department, and the world's military forces were put on notice: the Somali seas were now the most perilous in the world.

    Jay Bahadur, a journalist who dared to make his way into the remote pirate havens of Africa's easternmost country and spend months infiltrating their lives, gives us the first close-up look at the hidden world of the pirates of war-ravaged Somalia.

    Bahadur's riveting narrative exposé-the first ever-looks at who these men are, how they live, the forces that created piracy in Somalia, how the pirates spend the ransom money, how they deal with their hostages. Bahadur makes sense of the complex and fraught regional politics, the history of Somalia and the self-governing region of Puntland (an autonomous region in northeast Somalia), and the various catastrophic occurrences that have shaped their pirate destinies. The book looks at how the unrecognized mini-state of Puntland is dealing with the rise-and increasing sophistication-of piracy and how, through legal and military action, other nations, international shippers, the United Nations, and various international bodies are attempting to cope with the present danger and growing pirate crisis.

    A revelation of a world at the epicenter of political and natural disaster.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherPenguin Random House Audio
    Release dateJul 19, 2011
    ISBN9780307969798
    Unavailable
    The Pirates of Somalia: Inside Their Hidden World
    Author

    Jay Bahadur

    JAY BAHADUR is a Canadian freelance journalist who has published articles in The Times (London), The New York Times, Financial Times and The Globe and Mail. He has worked as a freelance correspondent for CBS News, advised the U.S. State Department on Somali piracy and appeared on CNN, the BBC, Canada AM and The Daily Show. Bahadur currently lives in Toronto, where he runs an international news website, Journalist Nation. Follow him on Twitter @PuntlandPirates and at jaybahadur.com.

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    Reviews for The Pirates of Somalia

    3.5/5

    30 ratings5 reviews

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    • 4/5
      First off, this author has dangly bits of steel. Flying into Somalia to write this book pretty much straight out of school ...This book details in great depth the who, how, and why of the pirating of the coast of Somalia. A very worthy read.
    • 2/5
      Necesito Audio en español .
      Estamos en México . En ingles solo que vea el texto
    • 4/5
      First off, this author has dangly bits of steel. Flying into Somalia to write this book pretty much straight out of school ...This book details in great depth the who, how, and why of the pirating of the coast of Somalia. A very worthy read.
    • 4/5
      Really 3 1/2 stars. Extremely interesting, but the writing is not great and the material is not terribly well-organized. The research is impressive, and I learned a lot, but it could have been so much better.
    • 3/5
      This book is a product of the young journalist's thirst for adventure and ambition to succeed at his craft. However, I couldn't help but think it would have been a much more entertaining and insightful book had it been in the hands of someone more experienced. At times, the book feels more of an academic exercise into the clan-based politics of Samalia, rather than the edge of your seat adventure I expected. Piracy is presented as the product of a complicated and divided culture that has been exposed and attacked through many years of civil war and political unrest.