Five Years of My Life

It was disappointing to me that we had to cut the semester short due to the lovely Michigan weather, but I must say that the most rewarding novel I read this semester in our Middle Eastern interpretation class was definitely Molly's selection of Five Years of My Life. This memoir was the first time my brain was opened to the horrors and ugly secrets of Guantanamo, sure I have seen it in the headlines and even made jokes with my friends about it, but it was more of a shocker than i could have ever imagined. The fact that a nineteen year old young man traveling to Pakistan to advance his education could be stopped in transit at an airline and sold for a seemingly small price to American soldiers under little to no speculation of the man being a terrorist is sickening. Until reading this memoir I was under the impression that the humiliating tortures described ended with Vietnam. Boy oh boy was i wrong, this event took place no less than a little under ten years ago. After reading this it really had me question our government as a whole and made me realize that the media will do anything except tell you the truth, they will dance around touchy subjects and controversial issues and take the smallest fragment of a truth and stretch it into a bold-face lie.

I was surprised that this lack for a better word epiphany, did not occur to me earlier in the semester. As a student this was the very first time I was exposed to such atrocity and have to say it was very stimulating for my brain to go off into "what if ?" mode. What if the war on terrorism is nothing more than a sham to gain control of wealth in terms of oil, what if 9/11 was a conspiracy, what if good ol' dubbya was behind all of this for personal gain?

I promise you I will not begin to bore you with my politcal beliefs, I just wanted to let all of you who didn't get the chance to read this book for class to know that if you were unsatisfied with the subject matter we covered, you owe it to yourself to read it. If anything, you will definitely be satisfied with yourself for reading something so twisted but so true. I think thats what I liked most about this class, that everything we read had a direct correlation to waht is going on in the world in todays day in age versus learning about allegory and symbolism from ancient pieces of literature.