Customer Reviews

The Miss Stone Affair: America's First Modern Hostage Crisis!

5 star:		(9)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(6)

 

 

I am Teresa Carpenter, author of the Miss Stone Affair. I feel compelled to correct two outrageous claims made by anonymous reviewers here on Amazon concerning the identity of the kidnappers of an American missionary woman in the amazing 1901 case I chronicle. One asserts that there is "One very important error" in the book , namely that Bulgarians never lived in this part of Macedonia and that the kidnappers were not Bulgarian." The other alleges, equally absurdly, that "Bulgarians never lived on this part of the Balkan peninsula." I cannot imagine how they can write this with a straight face when Bulgarians were so clearly the dominant force in the region during the time of the Stone kidnapping in 1901. I suspect the assertions of these "reviewers" are part of a partisan attempt to rewrite history more favorably to Serbs and Greeks. The facts say otherwise, and that is probably why they do not have the courage to sign their names. Thank you for allowing me to set the record straight.

As a student of the life of the US Minister to Turkey at the time of this kidnapping, I was thrilled when Ms Carpenter's book appeared. She has fleshed out some of the stories that I had read, in such a way that the entire event comes alive, vividly.

She must have had a good time researching this book, because it is filled with the kind of people you expect to find in a good historical novel--from the fearless spinster missionary to the motley cast of her would be rescuers. We end up feeling that all of them had more than one motive for their involvement, but Miss Stone makes it back home again, and so we feel, at the end, as happy as if we had read a good who-done-it.

Ms Carpenter is to be commended--it is an incident from history that can shed light on our own time, in which those who are keen on spreading terror and anarchy are not all that different from what happened a century ago....

Some day, I hope Ms Carpenter will tackle a full length book about John G A Leishman, the US Minister and his extended family. It extends from a rags-to-riches childhood in Pittsburgh, through the saving of H C Frick's life, to the presidency of Carnegie Steel, to seeing his daughters make marital matches in the European nobility, and having sons-in-law and grandsons who served on both sides of World Wars I and II.

Another good yarn that needs to be told! And Ms Carpenter is has the gift of story telling to do it well.

See my other reviews on related subjects: "After the Ball," "Meet You in Hell". "The Johnstown Flood", Martha Sanger's book about her ancestor H C Frick, "Mellon" (Canadine) and "Carnegie".

I have long admired Teresa Carpenter's writing -- mainly her ability to train her lens on a relatively narrow topic and, in the process, keep us riveted as she recreates entire worlds.

In "The Miss Stone Affair," a New York Times Notable Book, Carpenter's main subject is Ellen Stone, a Protestant missionary who in 1901 was kidnapped by a band of revolutionaries seeking to overthrow Turkish rule. Miss Stone was seized along with a pregnant Albanian woman named Katerina Tsilka.

What I love most about Carpenter's writing is how straightforward, even understated her prose is, as she expertly spins an engrossing tale. She did this with the trio of articles for the Village Voice that won her the Pulitzer Prize; she did it with her book "Missing Beauty," about the murder of a Tufts University professor; and she has done it here with the story of MIss Stone, whose unlikely adventure Carpenter tells with her inimitable grace.

The book is a short read about the life and abduction of Miss Stone--a middle aged spinster American missionary serving in Macedonia, a part of the then Ottoman Empire. If people knew the history of Macedonia, they would know that Albanians, Greeks, Serbs, and Bulgarians all consider this part of their ethnic lands. This is perhaps why all the other reviewers have an ax to grind in regards to who the kidnappers were. Regardless of who the kidnappers were (and they were probably some of all the ethnic groups), this story portrays the kidnapping, ransoming, and return of Miss Stone and her Bulgarian friend. The story shows how the American government and NGO reacted to the ransoming on an innocent.

I put this as an average read. This is a small story that really didn't affect the American government that much. I give credit to the author for writing about a little known event.

Ah, that great lost age, now faded into ghostly mist - the struggle for national liberation and unification of the Bulgarian people. Thank you for a great book, Teresa Carpenter. :) Miss Stone did have a great many admirers in Bulgaria and had such a positive impact on so many people. She was like a living legend roaming the mountains! The Bulgarian Mother Teresa. Her deep love, humanity and immense understanding of our native region are an inspiration for all of us. Wonderful book! Absolutely first-rate.

I came across this book after reading missionary Gracia Burnham's In the Presence of My Enemies, an account of her capture and that of her husband Martin by terrorists in the Philippines. Her book carried the controversial message that someone should have paid a ransom to ensure their safety. (Martin died in a gun battle during the rescue mission that Gracia survived.)

It amazed me to read in Teresa Carpenter's book that 100 years ago, the first kidnapping of an American on foreign soil, that of the Bulgarian missionary Ellen Stone, involved the very same issue of whether paying ransoms saves lives or merely encourages further kidnappings.

This is a fascinating book for its relevance today, as kidnappings continue to bedevil society, and missionaries continue to be prime targets. Because the author has to stuff in a lot of information for readers who don't know anything about Macedonia, Bulgaria, Turk and Ottoman history and the endless stuggles between these factions (myself included!), the going can be a little rough. But interspersed is a lot of fascinating material taken from unpublished diaries (one in particular written by a second woman taken along with Miss Stone)and newly unearthed documents. The book is well worth a read.

This is a really cool story, expertly written. It's difficult to put down once you start it. It depicts some amazing characters in a fascinating part of the world. Any future diplomats should be compelled to read this story as training for the delicacies and realities of negotiations. There seems to be controversy over the kidnappers' ethnicity in relation to Balkan politics today (2009) but the fact that most people living in Macedonia in the first decade of the 20th century considered themselves Bulgarian should not really effect the renascent Macedonian nationalism which is the result of a Bulgarian diaspora from the region over the course of two world wars and Communist regimes as well as the establishment of an independent Macedonia with the dissolution of the Yugoslav Republic. Hey, a part of Greater Bulgaria and Southern Macedonia seems to be forever attached to the Greek nation which should be of greater concern.

It is amazing how this convoluted story of Miss Stone's capture and release reflects the shifting political passions that have endured to this day in the Balkans. Teresa Carpenter's faithfulness to historical detail does not impede the flow of Miss Stone's story nor extinquish the mysteriousness of its characters. It was a great read. The book offers a wealth of material for historical fiction and what great material for a movie.

I was given the book as a gift with no knowledge about the incident involving Ellen Stone. With my limited knowledge of the political events of this part of the world during this time, I set about reading it as a novel...reminding myself often that this was non-fiction. Teresa Carpenter has done an excellent job in her research and her detail. She has presented this factual event with all the added information and quotations that make it read as a great "story". Thanks to this book, I feel I truly know this strong and determined woman. Since finishing The Miss Stone Affair, I have begun to wonder how many other "stories" are out there waiting to be told about incidents that are only single sentences in history books. I hope Ms. Carpenter continues with another book about another little known adventurer.

Thanks for a wonderful book and thanks for the great review. You are so right about the attempts to rewrite history. It is so sad, isnt it? Literally billions of dollars were spent doing it on the 'culture front', so to speak, both in former Yugoslavia and in Greece. And on the political front, tens of thousands were killed, and close to a million Bulgarians ethnically cleansed, i.e. expelled from Macedonia and Thrace, in the many wars during the first third of the 20th century. The remnants were brainwashed into something quite unrecognisible. 'Bulgaria, bulgarians' became a banned concept. Anyway, that is water under the bridge now. We've entered a Brave New World!

Here's an interesting article of medium proportions concerning the above mentioned issue, which you may find interesting, if you got a minute to spare. Thanks again!

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