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Forty Days
A celebrated CBS newsman recalls the trauma of the forty days he spent in an Iraqi prison during the Persian Gulf War and reveals how he relied on the memories of his life and family to pull him through. 50,000 first printing. $50,000 ad/promo.
- GenresMemoirWarNonfiction
318 pages, Hardcover
First published May 1, 1992
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Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews
August 11, 2017
A memoir that would have been frightening indeed to experience! Bob Simon, renowned t.v. journalist/ investigative reporter was abducted with a few of his team on the Saudi/ Kuwaiti border and held hostage in Iraq. Kidnapped at the start of the Operation Desert Storm and enduring horrible treatment, he also witnessed episodes of mercy and some of his captors were kind. A great tale of the horrors of being a prisoner of war, being accused as a spy, and the fragility of hope when all is despair.
Read for the twogalsandabook.com Alphabet Challenge letter "F"
Read for the twogalsandabook.com Alphabet Challenge letter "F"
September 18, 2026
Published in 1992, Forty Days is journalist Bob Simon’s account of the harrowing experience he endured after being captured in Iraq while reporting for CBS News. Simon—later so familiar to millions through 60 Minutes—was traveling with Peter Bluff, CBS News bureau chief in London; Robert Alvarez, a freelance cameraman from Miami; and Juan Caldera, a 29-year-old soundman and son of a wealthy Nicaraguan rancher.
It is a true story about survival, hope and struggle, but what fascinated me most was getting inside the mind of a journalist whose instinct to observe never seems to leave him—even when he becomes the story himself.
At one point Simon writes:
“I told them how naked I felt without my pen and my notebook.”
That may be the line that best explains him. A journalist deprived of the tools with which he records the world suddenly feels exposed himself. Later, reflecting upon the peculiar nature of his profession, he writes that journalists were “voyeurs at heart.” You took a peek at the forbidden, undressed an event, didn’t get involved—you watched, and then told the world what you had seen. It was, he says, the secret credo of the journalist.
Some of Simon’s observations are startlingly intimate. He writes that people should be allowed to scream unheard by anyone, without witnesses, because “the way you scream” is something deeply private and intimate. Elsewhere comes the ominous warning:
“Never believe anything they tell you.”
Captivity reduces life to such elemental truths. The undiscovered world becomes solitude. Simon describes sitting with his back against a wall, wrapping his arms around his knees like a schoolboy and simply allowing his mind to wander. He concludes that he was sometimes better off creating his own world and tucking himself deeply inside it.
There are passages that read almost like instructions for surviving not only imprisonment but life itself: Stop becoming. Start being. Stop trying and preparing and achieving, and sink softly back into the moment. Reality, he observes, takes a while to register. And when the need is great enough, a series of random events becomes infused with meaning.
His mother, Rose Simon, also makes a wonderful appearance through one of his memories. Regarding television, Simon recalls her saying:
“I don’t understand how people have time to watch this nonsense. There are so many books to read!”
I loved that.
And despite everything, humor survives. “Well, one more stop on the roller coaster,” Peter Bluff remarks at one point. The prisoners even play the word game Botticelli in an attempt to forget the day. There is something enormously human about that—four men in terrifying circumstances finding small ways to occupy their minds and maintain some sense of themselves.
Simon also understood something about borders that seems particularly appropriate for a lifelong foreign correspondent. Crossing them, leaving the neat lines behind, adds another dimension—or, as he beautifully puts it, perhaps it does away with dimensions. He compares the sensation to having been off a ski jump a few times: that feeling of crossing beyond what is known.
Yet the passage I cannot stop thinking about comes when Simon is sitting alone:
“I just sat in my corner, thinking about how much time we waste being anxious about things that never happen while the real dangers lurk unannounced.”
Those words were published in 1992.
I learned while reading Forty Days that Iraq was hardly Bob Simon’s only encounter with danger. He had survived other extraordinary experiences during decades of foreign reporting, including Vietnam and Bucharest. He survived war zones, imprisonment and situations in which death must have seemed very close.
And then fast-forward to February 2015.
Simon died unexpectedly in a car accident in New York City. There is something almost premonitory about the words he had written more than two decades earlier. On the West Side Highway, Simon was in the back seat of a hired car, reportedly working as he traveled. After all those years spent entering some of the most dangerous places in the world and returning home alive, the real danger arrived suddenly and ordinarily—in Manhattan.
Unannounced.
That knowledge changes the experience of reading Forty Days. A sentence written about captivity becomes a meditation on an entire life.
Simon writes elsewhere, “Everything that happened was meant to be.” He tells himself not to try to figure out how he feels, but instead to watch what he does, because that may be the only way to understand anything anymore. There is also the haunting thought that “a little quiet time has never hurt anyone.”
And perhaps that is what Forty Days ultimately gives the reader: quiet time with a man who spent his career racing toward events the rest of us watched safely from home.
At one point someone tells him, essentially, You know what really keeps me going, don’t you? I just want to see how this story is going to end.
Bob Simon lived to tell us how those forty days ended.
What he could never have known was how eerily some of the words he wrote about surviving them would one day speak to the ending of his own story.
It is a true story about survival, hope and struggle, but what fascinated me most was getting inside the mind of a journalist whose instinct to observe never seems to leave him—even when he becomes the story himself.
At one point Simon writes:
“I told them how naked I felt without my pen and my notebook.”
That may be the line that best explains him. A journalist deprived of the tools with which he records the world suddenly feels exposed himself. Later, reflecting upon the peculiar nature of his profession, he writes that journalists were “voyeurs at heart.” You took a peek at the forbidden, undressed an event, didn’t get involved—you watched, and then told the world what you had seen. It was, he says, the secret credo of the journalist.
Some of Simon’s observations are startlingly intimate. He writes that people should be allowed to scream unheard by anyone, without witnesses, because “the way you scream” is something deeply private and intimate. Elsewhere comes the ominous warning:
“Never believe anything they tell you.”
Captivity reduces life to such elemental truths. The undiscovered world becomes solitude. Simon describes sitting with his back against a wall, wrapping his arms around his knees like a schoolboy and simply allowing his mind to wander. He concludes that he was sometimes better off creating his own world and tucking himself deeply inside it.
There are passages that read almost like instructions for surviving not only imprisonment but life itself: Stop becoming. Start being. Stop trying and preparing and achieving, and sink softly back into the moment. Reality, he observes, takes a while to register. And when the need is great enough, a series of random events becomes infused with meaning.
His mother, Rose Simon, also makes a wonderful appearance through one of his memories. Regarding television, Simon recalls her saying:
“I don’t understand how people have time to watch this nonsense. There are so many books to read!”
I loved that.
And despite everything, humor survives. “Well, one more stop on the roller coaster,” Peter Bluff remarks at one point. The prisoners even play the word game Botticelli in an attempt to forget the day. There is something enormously human about that—four men in terrifying circumstances finding small ways to occupy their minds and maintain some sense of themselves.
Simon also understood something about borders that seems particularly appropriate for a lifelong foreign correspondent. Crossing them, leaving the neat lines behind, adds another dimension—or, as he beautifully puts it, perhaps it does away with dimensions. He compares the sensation to having been off a ski jump a few times: that feeling of crossing beyond what is known.
Yet the passage I cannot stop thinking about comes when Simon is sitting alone:
“I just sat in my corner, thinking about how much time we waste being anxious about things that never happen while the real dangers lurk unannounced.”
Those words were published in 1992.
I learned while reading Forty Days that Iraq was hardly Bob Simon’s only encounter with danger. He had survived other extraordinary experiences during decades of foreign reporting, including Vietnam and Bucharest. He survived war zones, imprisonment and situations in which death must have seemed very close.
And then fast-forward to February 2015.
Simon died unexpectedly in a car accident in New York City. There is something almost premonitory about the words he had written more than two decades earlier. On the West Side Highway, Simon was in the back seat of a hired car, reportedly working as he traveled. After all those years spent entering some of the most dangerous places in the world and returning home alive, the real danger arrived suddenly and ordinarily—in Manhattan.
Unannounced.
That knowledge changes the experience of reading Forty Days. A sentence written about captivity becomes a meditation on an entire life.
Simon writes elsewhere, “Everything that happened was meant to be.” He tells himself not to try to figure out how he feels, but instead to watch what he does, because that may be the only way to understand anything anymore. There is also the haunting thought that “a little quiet time has never hurt anyone.”
And perhaps that is what Forty Days ultimately gives the reader: quiet time with a man who spent his career racing toward events the rest of us watched safely from home.
At one point someone tells him, essentially, You know what really keeps me going, don’t you? I just want to see how this story is going to end.
Bob Simon lived to tell us how those forty days ended.
What he could never have known was how eerily some of the words he wrote about surviving them would one day speak to the ending of his own story.
February 12, 2015
News of Bob Simon's tragic death today in a car accident in New York City reminded me that I'd read his book years ago. It's a powerful story of survival, written with grace and modesty. Simon leaves you thinking that, while war may be hell, it need not strip us of our humanity. Rest in peace.
June 18, 2010
This book is about the journalist Bob Simon and his capture during the war in Kuait. It was ok, but I have a hard time with some of the things I read about...people can be so cruel to each other. He met some incredible people during his 40 days in captivity.
October 3, 2008
Insightful account of hardships as an Iraqi prisoner.
July 30, 2011
Simon's compelling account of being held hostage in Iraq during the first Gulf War. Harrowing tale offers incredible insight into Simon's suffering.
February 19, 2015
An amazing memoir of Bob Simon's 40 days as a POW during the first Gulf War. it is amazing to read this book, 23 years after it was published, and to realize that much hasn't changed.
April 12, 2015
Fascinating and compelling.
Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews