In the Company of Heroes by Michael Durant (Bantam, £10,99) is the life story of one of the helicopter pilots shot down in Mogadishu and captured and tortured by the Somali militiamen, in the incident described in Mark Bowden's Black Hawk Down: it's an astonishing tale of courage and tenacity. The Gate by FranÃois Bizot (Vintage, £7.99) is an hallucinatory memoir of the Cambodian killing fields by a French anthropologist. In 1971, he was captured by the Khmer Rouge but persuaded them after some months to release him; four years later, he lived through the siege of the French embassy in Phnom Penh; he is living these experiences still.
