Boek

Frank Westerman

Een woord een woord

‘The pen is mightier than the sword.’ Is that actually true?

Should you talk to terrorists? Will they see reason? These are basic, important questions. In A Word, A Word, Frank Westerman links his own experiences of hostage situations with the latest ideas as to how best to react to terror. It resulted in a gripping reportage about one of the stickiest problems of our time.

Westerman experienced train kidnappings in the north of the Netherlands as a boy, and later, as journalist, he witnessed Chechen terror in Russia. In this book he returns to the town where he grew up, and talks to several former kidnappers (one of whom is now a poet), as well as the psychiatrist who negotiated with them, whose successful mediation became known internationally as the ‘Dutch approach’.

Westerman underwent training in a police training village, in order to experience how it would be to negotiate with terrorists, and he weighs the patient, non-violent Dutch approach against the ruthless tactics employed by President Putin in dealing with Chechen terrorists in the late nineties. Which is more effective, the word or the bullet? Can the pen be mightier than the sword?

He concludes that they are mutually important: the weapon is ineffective without the word, and the sword is needed to protect the word.

Westerman is adept at using stories to stop the hardening of positions that leads to polarisation. He sees the role of the writer as vital in delving for precious facts, and so fuelling dialogue and debate, empathy and understanding. A Word, A Word is a defence of the softly-softly approach, a personal, engaged and well-informed report about the impact of bellicose language, and about the psyche of terrorists.

A Word, a Word is simultaneously history, reportage, drama, reflection and, not to be forgotten, literature.

De Volkskrant

Compelling, intelligent, urgent, investigative journalism at its best.

De Correspondent

Frank Westerman has a golden pen, a vividly historical imagination and a powerful motto: “to stop telling stories would be to the world’s detriment”.

NRC Handelsblad

The name Frank Westerman is synonymous with a new way of writing literature.

Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung

Vertalingen

Frank Westerman

Frank Westerman (b. 1964) studied Tropical Cultivation at Wageningen University. In 1987 he spent a year in the Peruvian Andes, researching the irrigation methods of Aymara Indians. Westerman is the author of many bestsellers: The Republic of Grain (1999), Engineers of the Soul (2002), El Negro and

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Details

Een woord een woord (2016). Non-fictie, 288 pagina's.
Aantal woorden: 71.000
Oplage: 12.000

Thema's: terrorisme

Uitgeverij

De Bezige Bij

Van Miereveldstraat 1
NL - 1071 DW Amsterdam
Netherlands
Tel: +31 20 305 98 10
Fax: +31 20 305 98 24

E-mail:
[email protected]
Website:
http://www.debezigebij.nl

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