The Miss Stone Affair America's First Modern Hostage Crisis

On September 3, 1901, a Protestant missionary named Ellen Stone set out on horseback across the mountainous hinterlands of Balkan Macedonia and was ambushed by a band of armed revolutionaries.InThe Miss Stone Affair,Teresa Carpenter re-creates an event that captured the attention of the world and posed a dilemma for incoming president Theodore Roosevelt. Should he send in the Navy or not? And, if so, send it where? Drawing upon a wealth of contemporary correspondence and documents, Carpenter constructs a narrative that is suspenseful, harrowing, and at times even comical. It is a story for our time.

Teresa Carpenter is a former senior editor of The Village Voice, where her articles on crime and the law won a Pulitzer Prize. She is the author of four books, She lives in New York's Greenwich Village with her husband, Newsweek columnist Steven Levy, and their son.