Who Killed Daniel Pearl?
by Bernard-Henri Levy, translated by James X. Mitchell
Duckworth, £20, pp. 454, ISBN 0715632612
The last time Mariane Pearl saw her husband Daniel, correspondent for the Wall Street Journal, she was preparing a celebratory dinner for their last night in Karachi, and he was setting off for a final interview he believed crucial for a story about the ‘shoe bomber’ and the fundamentalist Islamic underground groups in Pakistan. She was six months pregnant. Pearl, by all accounts, was an energetic, loving, humorous man, full of intelligence and curiosity. He never returned. Eight days later, his kidnappers murdered him. A Mighty Heart, written slowly in the months after his killing and the birth of their son, is her attempt to make sense of what happened, to describe, hour by hour, the search for her missing husband, and in so doing shed some light on the confused and terrifying world of terrorist intrigue.
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