A Week of Hell — Papa Faal

While the Gambian president Sir Dawda Kairaba Jawara was out of the country on vacation, a band of twelve renegades and civilians slipped into the tiny country of the Gambia in West Africa. The gang of rebels took over the government and held the president's wife, children, and brother; government ministers; foreign diplomats; and expatriates hostage while releasing the country's most dangerous prisoners, inflicting a frenzy of carnage and chaos.

Follow one family's incredible story of survival in A Week of Hell, a book that has been called ''a human face on the recurring, ubiquitous, and violent military coups d'état that plagued Africa--West Africa in particular.''