Even Silence Has an End

The gripping story begins with the author--a hostage in the Amazon rainforest--attempting to escape a wooden cage. The Colombian presidential candidate's third attempt to run away failed. The reasons for her six-year imprisonment emerge during the account of her traumatic memories. In 2002, Betancourt was kidnapped by the FARC, a communist guerilla group trying to liberate Colombian peasants from a corrupt dictatorship. The deep-voiced American narrator, Margaret Nichols, embodies the prisoner's frustrating uncertainty and depression at never knowing if she will be released or executed. Reading an English translation of the original book, Nichols stumbles on the remaining Spanish. Listeners who don't speak the language may not notice, but the author's ethnicity would have been preserved and the audiobook improved with a bilingual narrator. J.A.H. (c) AudioFile 2010, Portland, Maine