{"id":857,"date":"2004-10-06T15:12:40","date_gmt":"2004-10-06T15:12:40","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.adambowie.com\/2004\/10\/bel_canto\/"},"modified":"2004-10-06T15:12:40","modified_gmt":"2004-10-06T15:12:40","slug":"bel_canto","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.adambowie.com\/blog\/2004\/10\/bel_canto\/","title":{"rendered":"Bel Canto"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I started reading this <A HREF=\"http:\/\/www.amazon.co.uk\/exec\/obidos\/ASIN\/1841155837\">book<\/A> a while ago, but had to put it to one side for a bit. The story begins with a concert being given in a South American country by a famous opera diva for the benefit of an executive from a Japanese electronics manufacturer that the country&#8217;s hoping will build a factory locally. The country&#8217;s president should be there, but he can&#8217;t miss the primetime edition of his favourite soap opera, so he&#8217;s feigned an illness.<br \/>\nBut it&#8217;s at this concert that a rebel group decides to invade the house and take the president hostage. When they realise that the president&#8217;s not there (only the vice president is present), a prolongued hostage situation begins.<br \/>\nThe way that this unfolds is quite gentle, and I guess it was the sudden real life tragedy of Beslan interrupted my story, and the so far rosy image of life as a hostage was suddenly thrown aside by the grim realities we were hearing about from Russia.<br \/>\nBut it&#8217;s a great book, and so I picked it back up, and continued reading. I won&#8217;t spoil the ending, but it doesn&#8217;t disappoint.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>1841155837<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"cybocfi_hide_featured_image":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-857","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books"],"amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.adambowie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/857","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.adambowie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.adambowie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.adambowie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.adambowie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=857"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.adambowie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/857\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.adambowie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=857"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.adambowie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=857"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.adambowie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=857"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}