An Expensive Education

by NickMcDonell (Author)

• New

  Paperback
  2010

  $10.32

  An army roadblock. An American intelligence agent. A jetlagged afternoon on the Somalian plain. Michael Teak is not afraid of mercenaries. Life here comes at a price and as a CIA operative, Teak is holding the money. On the back seat of his car is a suitcase stuffed with narcotics; in the front, a gun and an envelope of US dollars. And then a bomb explodes.

  Thirty innocent victims. An entire village of women and children - all dead. And just like that, Michael Teak does not know anything for sure. Was he the target, or the scapegoat for mass murder with an international fallout? Abandoned, perhaps betrayed, by his employer, Teak is in the wind with nowhere to turn. Even his old sources are caught up in the media bloodbath back at his alma mater. These events have to be connected. Someone, somewhere, has all the cards and for a man running right down to the wire, the rules of the game are becoming dangerously blurred.

• Used

  Paperback
  2009

  $4.20

  Professor Susan Lowell has it made. A happily married mother of two in a tenure-track job at Harvard, she has just won a Pulitzer Prize for her book lionizing Hatashil, an East African freedom fighter. David Ayan is her singular Somali-born student. He is trying to become a member of one of Harvard's elite finals clubs. He is trying to understand Jane, his upscale girlfriend. He is trying, sometimes, just to get by in America, an unfamiliar world. Michael Teak is a twenty-five-year-old Harvard graduate working as an American intelligence operative who meets Hatashil in David's homestead. It is Michael who witnesses the massacre that will upend all their lives... Moving from a decimated Somalian village to Harvard's dormitories, drinking holes and exclusive fraternities, An Expensive Education is a powerful portrait of personalities ensnared in the African conflict, and of the troubled intersection of ivory-tower academia and realpolitik.