Roy Hallums’ book “Buried Alive” is pure writing genius. It is like listening to a radio live report from the scene of the kidnapping incident. It is so vivid that every paragraph can even become a short story. From the day he was kidnapped to the day he was rescued and reunited with his family, Hallums is a born storyteller with a gift of clarity.
I came from a country where kidnapping stories are part and parcel of the daily newscast. I know how a story can exactly hit an emotion. Once a writer hits that part of the human sense, it is a success far more important than book sales. Hallums did it that exactly. He wrote “Buried Alive” to target people’s emotions – to let them experience what he had gone through. He described in the book how he slept on hard concrete floor during cold November nights, how he tracked time by studying the Muslim’s praying times. The horrific scenes were those moments he was beaten, his captors placed the gun barrel to his mouth, and his head slammed with a pistol. Hallums also recounted how the plastic used to tie his wrist was cutting into his flesh.
Hallums made mention of the Philippines and Filipinos in the book many times. But as I decipher the significance of most of their inclusion, I could not see any reason to even put them there, aside from the fact that he was with another kidnapped guy, Robert Tarongoy, a Filipino contractor. Probably, he just wanted to get some Filipino audience (like me) to patronize the book. After all, kidnappings in the southern part of my country is rampant. “Buried Alive” can be a bestseller for Filipinos.
Aside from the clear descriptions of the place Hallums had been kept during captivity, the book also gives actual pictures of places that are just as harsh-looking as they were described. Readers can easily connect to the words and the pictures — the combination actually makes reading interesting and very easy to comprehend.
Grab a copy of the book and I promise you, it is worth the time. Roy Hallums remarkable story of survival in the hands of the Muslim captors will keep on the edge of your seat.
You can buy the book from Amazon, here.
Book Details:
Buried Alive
by Roy Hallums
249 pages
Thomas Nelson Publishers
