Review: ISIS killed her son. She met them face to face.
U.S. journalist James Foley during a 2011 press conference in Boston. He was murdered in 2014 by Islamic State militants in Syria. (CNS photo/Steven Senne, AP photo via Marquette University) It took moral courage for her son to report on the war in Syria. It took moral courage for his mother to see his killers face to face.
In American Mother, Diane Foley and Colum McCann write the story of Foley’s life and that of her son, James Foley, leading up to his imprisonment and death at the hands of ISIS in 2014. The topic is exceedingly difficult, yet the book is surprisingly easy to read, written with a mother’s love, her eventual understanding of hostage situations and her desire for others to understand the struggle she faced.
I was 14 when Jim Foley’s beheading was announced on TV, and I remember the event only broadly in the context of ISIS posing a threat to the country. Even with my cursory knowledge of the event, I could read American Mother with no need to do any research; someone with a better memory of that time, on the other hand, could also pick up the book and not become bored with too much on-page explanation.
The narrative structure of American Mother, divided into three “books,” sets the reader in medias res for the first book, then jumps backward for a retrospective, eventually moving to the present day.
American Mother is Colum McCann’s first work of nonfiction. (He won the National Book Award in 2009 for his novel Let the Great World Spin.) It has the slightest narrative flair to it, especially in the shaping and ordering of chapters—the “prologue” normally found at the beginning of many a novel occurs later in the book. However, Foley’s voice, as a mother and as a defender of the powerless, shines through.
The book follows Diane Foley’s story from mother to mourner to activist. But she spends chapters outlining her son’s life, too, the one to whom she has dedicated the past 10 years. She spends chapters describing Jim as a boy, as a Marquette University student (a man for others!), a teacher and eventually a conflict journalist. Jim is, naturally, the reason for her activism in the first place; and these long descriptions of her son, his life as she knew it and as his friends later described it to her, reveal the selflessness of this mother.
His altruistic motives to travel to Libya and later Syria to tell the stories of people in war-torn regions are somewhat mirrored in his mother, whose work on behalf of civilian hostages similarly reflects a desire to help others.
Diane Foley’s meeting with Alexanda Kotey—one of the “Beatles,” the four British converts to Islam who tortured and beheaded Jim Foley and other hostages in Syria—opens the book. Her courage in choosing this encounter, as well as testifying in the trial against El Shafee Elsheikh, another of her son’s killers, comes through despite her matter-of-fact tone when recounting the meetings.
Foley mentions her naïveté and the times her emotional state became disturbed, either because she believed the word of someone who could have been trustworthy or because she was, as a mother, bringing her feelings into her decisions too often.
But her humility in that courage, in persevering through these multiple meetings over years about the brutal murder of her eldest son, cannot be overstated—I could see someone bragging from the rooftops about shaking hands with their son’s notorious killer, but Diane Foley does not do so. Diane’s awareness of the Holy Spirit’s work in her entire family’s lives is astute, and her description of her son as, again, a person for others can easily be reflected back onto herself.
McCann, an experienced writer, ought perhaps to have taken a heavier editorial hand to the work to prevent some of the repetitiveness, which would be less noticeable if the work were longer than its 250 pages.
As Diane Foley reveals her story and shows how it intertwines with that of her son, she also lays blame at the feet of responsible parties, far too many of whom are members of the U.S. government. From Susan Rice (no relation to the reviewer) and President Obama, who among others made promises to the Foleys that Jim was their highest priority, to F.B.I. officers who provided little assistance to the family searching for their loved one, to the many officials who told the Foleys and other families of hostages that they should not pay the hostage-takers, the U.S. government’s behavior throughout this story will only confirm the conviction of those who have a low opinion of how it handles hostage situations. She mentions by name those who were of assistance; they are far fewer in number than those who were unhelpful.
Although Foley fights fiercely for her son’s release—and then, after his death, on behalf of civilian hostages around the world—she does not take her anger out on the men who killed her son. These interactions with the ISIS members make possibly the most intense and well-written parts of the book. Foley’s unwavering faith and her belief in forgiveness and in humanity add a spiritual aspect to the book that ties in well with her family’s and especially her son’s faith. Her expressions of compassion and mercy even when the killers seem to show no remorse for playing a part in murdering her son feel themselves like a gift from the Holy Spirit.
In describing her son, she writes, “His courage was moral. His morality had courage.” The moral courage of Jim Foley is obvious in view of his journalistic support for civilians trapped in the middle.
In this book, his mother’s moral courage becomes evident as well. This mother, who has seen images of her beheaded son, who faced two of the men who pleaded or were found guilty of his death, who went against instructions from all sorts of government officials to remain quiet, shows her fortitude in different yet powerful ways.
American Mother is an eminently approachable work about an impossibly difficult topic, accessible both to those who remember the day of Jim Foley’s death like it was yesterday and to those who would like to become better informed. And Diane Foley’s own story coming through in these pages is one of immense strength and faith in God’s mercy and forgiveness.
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