Description:
Man Without a Gun is a thrilling memoir of Giandomenico Picco's two decades as a high-level diplomat for the United Nations. Over the course of his career, Picco helped negotiate the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan and helped bring an end to the bloody Iran-Iraq war, but he also had several harrowing encounters with Middle Eastern terrorists--whom he met unarmed. In one memorable episode, he walked out of an embassy in Beirut and was grabbed on the street, thrown into a car with his face jammed to the floor, and whisked to a secret location to discuss the release of Western hostages with their masked captors. Other experiences are equally unnerving, such as a trip to Tehran to share unwelcome news with Iranian president Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani: the United States had just refused to reciprocate an act of goodwill (the release of hostage Terry Anderson). Picco wondered whether he would get out of the country alive; he did, but only because Rafsanjani offered this advice: "I think it is best if you leave Tehran very, very quickly." "History does not kill," Picco writes of what his experiences have taught him. "Religion does not rape women, the purity of blood does not destroy buildings, and institutions do not fail. Only individuals do these things." Man Without a Gun is at turns wise and exciting--a wonderful and revealing account of modern diplomacy. --John J. Miller
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