Kerry Pither

Special thanks to author David Cornwell, better known by his pen name John le Carré, who has taken the time to read Dark Days, and to send an endorsement. Here’s what he has to say:

Sober, well written and horrific. Grit your teeth and read. These are your rights too.

John le Carré most recently authored A Most Wanted Man, a book the Guardian says is ‘one of the most sophisticated fictional responses to the war on terror yet published.’

Quill and Quire, “Canada’s magazine of book news and reviews,” says Dark Days is “an essential book for our morally ambiguous times,” and has chosen it as one of fifteen books (and one of four non-fiction books) to remember from 2008.

Here’s the full article from the December issue of Quill and Quire:

Anyone who believes that Canada is exempt from the human rights abuses of the so-called “global war on terror” needs to think again. In an essential book for our morally ambiguous times, human rights advocate Kerry Pither looks at the stories of four Canadian citizens — Maher Arar, Ahmad El Maati, Abdullah Almalki and Muayyed Nureddin — who were imprisoned in Egypt and Syria, held without charge or counsel, and tortured, all with the implicit sanction of our government. Those abuses made headlines this fall with the release of the Iacobucci report; Pither’s book is a resounding clarion call for Canadians concerned with due process and the presumption of innocence.

The Toronto Star’s Haroon Siddiqui has written a column today about how the headlines don’t match up with the reality of what’s in the Iacobucci Inquiry’s report. Siddiqui has nice things to say about my book, Dark Days: The Story of Four Canadians Tortured in the Name of Fighting Terror too. “It is a compelling – and, as it turns out, accurate – account of the horrors they [the men] endured,” he says.