Blake Schwendiman's Blog and Blook

My brother recently met Kurt Muse, the subject of and the co-author of the book Six Minutes To Freedom and after that meeting my brother called and suggested I read the book. I ordered it immediately, but had other books in my queue ahead of that one, so I didn't get to it until this weekend.

I have not read a lot of books like this. I'm not sure how it's officially categorized. It could be a historical novel or it could be broadly categorized as non-fiction. In a nutshell, it's a novelization of the events surrounding Kurt Muse's involvement in the invasion of Panama in 1989. The events primarily center around Muse's arrest, imprisonment and rescue, but there is a great deal of general historical information in the book. The author clearly states in the afterword that many of the names were fictional, the conversations were generally created from generalities and that some of the characters were amalgams of various people in similar positions (such as the prison guards). So, I don't know what category this falls in, but I haven't read much of anything like it.

I loved it. For a book with so much political and historical information, I found myself unable to put it down. I read it in basically two sittings because it was so enthralling. It reads like an action/suspense novel, but it feels deeper because you know that it contains a large amount of reality. If you're currently looking for something new to read, this is one I would recommend highly.