3,096 Days by Natascha Kampusch

Hello everyone ,I am sure you guys have watched the movie 3,096 Days which was released in local cinemas recently . Some of my friends were shocked by the horrifying details of Natascha Kampusch kidnapping ordeal .Here is some background about Natascha Kampusch before i review the book :

Natascha Maria Kampusch (born 17 February 1988) is an Austrian woman known for her abduction at the age of 10 on 2 March 1998. Kampusch was held in a secret cellar by her kidnapper Wolfgang Přiklopil for more than eight years, until she escaped on 23 August 2006.

Her kidnapping 

The 10-year-old Kampusch left her family's residence in Vienna's Donaustadt district on the morning of 2 March 1998, but failed to arrive at school or come home. A 12-year-old witness reported having seen her being dragged into a white minibus by two men,although Kampusch did not report a second man being present. A massive police effort followed in which 776 minivans were examined,including that of her kidnapper, Přiklopil, who lived about half an hour from Vienna by car in the Lower Austrian town of Strasshof an der Nordbahn, near Gänserndorf. Although he stated that on the morning of the kidnapping he was alone at home, the police were satisfied with his explanation that he was using the minibus to transport rubble from the construction of his home.

Speculations of child pornography rings or organ theft were offered,leading officials to also investigate possible links to the crimes of the French serial killer Michel Fourniret.Because Kampusch had carried her passport with her when she left (she had been on a family trip to Hungary a few days before), the police extended the search abroad. Accusations against Kampusch's family complicated the issue even more;there have even been unsubstantiated allegations that Kampusch's mother was somehow involved in the abduction or its cover-up.

Escape

The 18-year-old Kampusch reappeared on 23 August 2006. She was cleaning and vacuuming her kidnapper's White Work Van in the garden. At 12:53 pm, someone called Přiklopil on his mobile phone. Because of the vacuuming noise, he walked away to take the call. Kampusch left the vacuum cleaner running and ran away, unseen by Přiklopil, who, according to the caller, completed the phone call without any sign of being disturbed or distracted. Kampusch ran for some 200 metres through gardens and a street, jumping fences, and asking passers-by to call the police, but they paid her no attention. After about five minutes, she knocked on the window of a 71-year-old neighbour known as Inge T, saying, "I am Natascha Kampusch". The neighbour called the police, who arrived at 1:04 pm. Later, Kampusch was taken to the police station in the town of Deutsch-Wagram. Přiklopil, having found that the police were after him, killed himself by jumping in front of a suburban train near the Wien Nord station in Vienna. He had apparently planned to commit suicide rather than be caught, having told Kampusch that "they would not catch him alive".

3,096 Days by Natascha Kampusch

On 2 March 1998 ten-year-old Natascha Kampusch was snatched off the street by a stranger and bundled into a white van. Hours later she found herself in a dark cellar, wrapped in a blanket. When she emerged eight years later, her childhood had gone. In "3,096 Days" Natascha tells her incredible story for the first time: her difficult childhood, what exactly happened on the day of her abduction, her imprisonment in a five-square-metre dungeon, and the mental and physical abuse she suffered from her abductor, Wolfgang Priklopil. "3,096 Days" is ultimately a story about the triumph of the human spirit. It describes how, in a situation of almost unbearable hopelessness, she slowly learned how to manipulate her captor. And how, against inconceivable odds, she managed to escape unbroken.  Its very horryfing to read the ordeal of Natasha and i hope this book  brings closure for her ........

American Sniper: The Autobiography of the Most Lethal Sniper in U.S. Military History

Hello again everyone , I read another book which i would like to share with you guys , firstly i would like to talk about the author of the book : 

Christopher Scott "Chris" Kyle (April 8, 1974 – February 2, 2013) was a United States Navy SEAL known as the most lethal sniper in American military history with 160 confirmed kills out of 255 claimed kills, although these statistics have not been released by the Pentagon.

Kyle served four tours in the second Iraq conflict and was awarded the 4th highest commendation awarded for acts of heroism, acts of merit, and/or meritorious service in a combat zone, the Bronze Star Medal and the third highest level of valor awarded Silver Star Medal multiple times. Iraqi insurgents dubbed him the "Devil of Ramadi" and offered a bounty for his head. He was shot twice, and was involved in six IED attacks.

Kyle decided to spend time with his family and was honorably discharged from the US Navy in 2009. He remained in the spotlight after leaving the Navy and wrote a New York Times bestselling autobiography, American Sniper. Kyle was shot and killed at a shooting range by a fellow veteran on February 2, 2013, near Chalk Mountain, Texas.

I bought the book once i read about Chris Kyle`s death which caught my interest . Here is the book review :

American Sniper: The Autobiography of the Most Lethal Sniper in U.S. Military History

“American Sniper” is retired Navy SEAL sniper Chris Kyle’s gripping and dramatic account of how he became the deadliest sniper in U.S. military history, with more than 160 officially confirmed “kills” in the Iraq War from 2003 to 2009.

Mr. Kyle’s early life and military exploits read like a thrilling adventure movie. Growing up in Odessa, Texas, he hunted animals with a bolt-action 30-06 rifle and had a talent for “breaking” horses. While in college, Mr. Kyle became a proficient enough horseman to earn money as a professional bronco rodeo rider until he was injured when a bronco flipped over him. With an interest in becoming a ranch manager, he started out as a ranch hand and eventually made his way to Colorado. On a second try to join the Navy, a recruiter called to ask whether he was interested in becoming a SEAL.

Joining the Navy in February 1999, he began the rigorous physical training program required to become a SEAL. He ended up as one of the 10 percent of the starting class to graduate. After additional advanced training, he was selected to SEAL Team 3, based in Coronado, Calif., whose teams saw action in the Middle East.

Of particular interest is Mr. Kyle’s explanation of how the military services’ special operations units operate, with each having a specialty. The Army Rangers, for example, make up a large assault force, while SEALs operate as quick surgical strike forces against small but high-value targets, such as the unit from SEAL Team 6 that killed Osama bin Laden.

Mr. Kyle’s first assignment, during the 2002-03 winter, was with a SEAL mission that boarded and searched ships carrying illicit weaponry in the Persian Gulf off Iraq.

The book’s narrative turns dramatic when Operation Iraqi Freedom began in March 2003 and he became a gunner in forward-deployed SEAL scout missions that supported Army and Marine Corps units as they advanced rapidly throughout the country to defeat Saddam Hussein's army. With opposition elements, including al Qaeda, beginning to mount an armed insurgency, Mr. Kyle’s sniper specialty became indispensable, especially in rural and urban warfare environments. In the great distances afforded by a rural countryside, his shots would run from 800 to 1,200 yards. In the proximity of urban combat, where he made most of his “kills,” the range of his shots was 200 to 400 feet.

Along with the regular military forces his units were supporting, their missions were required, he explains, because the insurgents were resisting the pacification of their areas, which was a precondition for stabilizing the conditions for infrastructure reconstruction and state building to commence. For a sniper, understanding mission objectives was crucial because he had to be careful to distinguish between insurgents and innocent bystanders.

“Make an unjustified shot and you could be charged with murder,” he writes.

Especially revealing is Mr. Kyle’s discussion of the nature of the insurgents he encountered. He described some of them as cowards who “routinely used drugs to stoke their courage. Without them, alone, they were nothing.” Others were “one part terrorists, another part criminal gangs,” and some of the most dangerous were the religiously extremist al Qaeda fighters.

His exploits earned him legendary stature. In the course of battles in some of the country’s most dangerous cities, such as Fallujah and Ramadi, when U.S. soldiers were fighting running battles in the streets against thousands of insurgents, he killed so many insurgents that the Ramadi insurgents singled him out. They put out a $20,000 bounty on his head and gave him the name “Al-Shaitan Ramadi” - “the Devil of Ramadi.”

His most legendary shot was outside Sadr City in 2008 when he spotted an insurgent with a rocket launcher near an Army convoy. The distance of 2,100 yards was too far for his scope to “even dial up the shooting solution,” but he killed the insurgent anyway with a shot from his .338 rifle.

For his valor in battle, he received two Silver Stars and five Bronze Medals.

One of the book’s dramatic leitmotifs involves Mr. Kyles’ marriage to his wife, Taya. Like many other military wives, she braved through the birth and early lives of their two children as well as tensions in their relationship while he was overseas, including his numerous injuries and various forms of post-traumatic stress disorder after his periodic returns from his dangerous deployments in Iraq. Yet their love for each other, her inner strength and their enduring religious faith were strong enough to sustain their marriage.

After leaving the Navy in 2009, he returned to his native Texas and established Craft International, a firm that provides military and law enforcement sniper training as well as private security protection. He volunteers his time with wounded-warrior foundations.

World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War

Hi everyone , this is my first blog post which is going be one of the many updates I am going bring on about books that I have read .I love reading books regardless the genre . I am still the old school type of person where people are and has migrated to eBooks and I still love the feeling of a physical book in my hand. Here we go to my first book review:

World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War

World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War is a 2006 apocalyptic horror novel by Max Brooks. It is a follow-up to his 2003 satirical survival manual, The Zombie Survival Guide, but is much more serious in its tone. 

The novel is a collection of individual accounts, where the narrator is an agent of the United Nations Post-war Commission ten years after the fictional Zombie War. Other passages record a decade-long desperate war against the zombie plague, as experienced by people of various nationalities. 

The personal accounts also describe the social, political, religious and environmental changes that resulted from the war. World War Z was inspired by The Good War, an oral history of World War II by Studs Terkel, and by the zombie films of George A. Romero. Brooks used World War Z to comment on government ineptitude and American isolationism, while also examining survivalism and uncertainty. The book spawned a movie titled World War Z directed by Marc Forster. 

The screenplay by Matthew Michael Carnahan is based on the 2006 novel of the same name by Max Brooks. The film stars Brad Pitt as Gerry Lane, a former United Nations investigator who must travel the world to find a way to stop a zombie-like pandemic. The book is a much better read than watching movie. I must admit that I watched the movie first then I read the book. 

The movie is good but the book was much is detail about the subject matter. I tend to agree with the author of the book: Max Brooks said his novel about a world nearly destroyed by a zombie pandemic, shares the same title as the movie "and that's it."He talked about his book and the movie during an interview at Mansfield University. I knew they were going to rewrite it. I grew up in Hollywood. I knew it was going to go through a million changes. “I would definitely recommend you to read the book and I am not going to stop you from watching the movie either. With that note I leave you with the trailer of the movie

Introduction : Who am I

Introduction

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