Sunday, June 12, 2011

Book Review: Priceless by Tom Davis



Summary

Photojournalist Stuart Daniels has found purpose in life. After suffering the fallout of a tragic assignment, Daniels rediscovered his faith while helping a young African orphan. Now his photo work carries a greater mission: To educate people about social injustice happening around the world.

Daniels next assignment carries him back overseas and into the heart of Russia. Once there, Daniels is persuaded by an old friend to help save two girls from a desperate situation. Soon he becomes a key player in a dangerous campaign to rescue helpless women trapped in the sex-slave trade. What Daniels encounters during his journey will shake his faith, test his courage, and even threaten his life. Yet as Daniels gets deeper and the stakes get higher, he will discover that hope can be found in the darkest of places.

Review
Priceless is the kind of book that will pick you up and by the time you get to put it down again your heart is in pieces. Sex trafficking. It's an ugly phrase and, for anyone familiar with the global statistics that accompany it, can sometimes seem like all efforts are just a drop in the ocean compared to the overwhelming size of its scale. While this book is set in Russia there is almost no nation of earth that doesn't have a sex trafficking problem.

It's easy to think that it's a problem for places like Russia, India, Thailand and Cambodia. But the more you find out the more you find that "safe" Western places like New Zealand, Australia and the United States are not immune.

Tom Davis does a magnificent job of putting creating faces and stories to go behind the mind-blowing numbers. Of reminding us that while the scale of the problem may seem insurmountable, sex trafficking is a story about individuals. That every girl rescued from being a victim of those who trade human beings as commodities, is one more person freed from a life of terror, slavery, abuse and hopelessness.

Buy this book. Read this book. Buy multiple copies and give it away. And then do something to add your drop to the ocean.

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