The husband and wife team will speak about their ordeal from the two
corners of the world: Afghanistan/Pakistan and New York City. The Book
Night will take place at Club Quarters, 40 West 45 Street with reception
at 6 p.m. and Conversation at 6:30 p.m. Books will be for sale and
signing. For reservations call the OPC at 212-626-9220, e-mail or log on to the website.
At the OPC Awards Dinner last April David Rohde lit the candle to honor all the journalists killed during the previous year. He had just survived a seven month kidnapping and incarceration by the Taliban. This book tells the tale of his escape by climbing over the wall of the compound where he was being held in the North Waziristan region of Pakistan — hence —the rope. Rohde along with a local reporter, Tahir Ludin and their driver Asadullah Mangal were abducted outside Kabul in November 2008. Rohde was traveling to meet a Taliban commander for an interview that he knew was risky, but he thought it important to close his book about the Afghan war with an actual interview with a Taliban leader. Of the ordeal, Harvey Rohde, David’s Father, said that while he regretted this his son had made the trip, he understood his motivation “to get both sides of the story, to have his book honestly portray not just the one side but the other side as well.”
The captured group was taken deep into the tribal areas of neighboring Pakistan and they were kept on the move for seven months partly to escape American drone attacks. In the process, Rohde became the first American to see up-close the thriving terrorist mini-state that the Taliban had established inside Pakistan. As their captors trained suicide bombers and plotted attacks, Rohde and his colleagues witnessed how Pakistan’s powerful military turns a blind eye to the Taliban activities.
In New York, Rohde’s wife, Kristen Mulvihill, together with his family and the staff of The New York Times struggled to navigate a labyrinth of information and mis-information all the while keeping the kidnapping secret for months. Mulvihill’s life became agonizing and surreal, as she shuttled between her job as photo director at Cosmopolitan magazine — one moment she was supervising a celebrity photo shoot and the next she was meeting with the FBI. She came to realize that no one knew where David was or how to secure his release, hence, the prayer.
David Rohde is winner of two Pulitzer Prizes. One for his coverage of the Srebrenica massacre — he also won the 1995 OPC Hal Boyle Award for exposing this massacre — and the second Pulitzer was for The New York Times 2008 team coverage of Afghanistan and Pakistan.