Padnos’s searching account of the almost two years he spent in the clutches of Jabhat al-Nusra, the main Qaeda affiliate in Syria. The Syrian guides turn out to be jihadi kidnappers. They abduct Padnos, who is promptly sucked into a subterranean archipelago of pain — a series of filthy jails where he is whipped and electrocuted as bombs rain down outside. He is plagued by lice and the screams of fellow prisoners. Hunger is a constant companion.

Padnos’s memoir, Blindfold: A Memoir of Capture, Torture, and Enlightenment, is particularly grueling because its author courted risk so nonchalantly.

Padnos’ exquisitely painful accounts of his torture, and the tortures and deaths of his fellow inmates, both horrify and provoke a strange hope that it can’t get any worse. He survives, in part, by dreaming of a brook in Vermont, letting his mind drift to the most important parts of his life and, eventually, writing a novel on paper given to him by one of his captors.

This harrowing memoir follows his two-year captivity and torture, including beatings and waterboarding, in makeshift prisons in almost day-by-day detail. In addition to shedding insight into his own fears, especially whether or not he would survive, Padnos also takes care to explore the mindsets of his various captors, some of whom were even sympathetic toward him, while others embraced a complete conviction that they were soldiers of God and that the United States would soon be overthrown.

Account of the author’s kidnapping and imprisonment at the hands of religious extremists in Syria..