BOOK REVIEW / NONFICTION : A Mideast Hostage and His Wife: the Sutherland Diaries : AT YOUR OWN RISK: An American Chronicle of Crisis and Captivity in the Middle East by Tom Sutherland and Jean Sutherland; Fulcrum Publishing $27.95, 432 pages

Tom and Jean Sutherland, a pair of college professors from Colorado, were victims of terrorism in the Middle East. But the explosion that blew apart their lives took 2,354 days to spend itself--Tom was abducted from the streets of Beirut by machine-gun toting members of the Islamic Jihad, and he spent the next 6 1/2 years in captivity.

“Kidnapped!” writes Tom Sutherland of the terrible moment when his ordeal began. “Can’t be true! Must be dreaming.”

“At Your Own Risk” is actually a joint memoir, co-written by husband and wife, each one telling the story from their perspective in alternating chapters. It’s a unique opportunity to descend into someone else’s nightmare, an exercise in fixing the physical and emotional reality of hostage-taking by a kind of triangulation.

We encounter the Sutherlands first as American expatriates who arrived in embattled Lebanon with the best of intentions and a certain degree of innocence--Tom was dean of agriculture at the American University of Beirut (AUB), and Jean taught English. But, soon enough, they come to realize that they have placed themselves in a war zone where assassinations, bombings and kidnappings were almost routine.

“Shelling stopped midmorning but everyone was tense,” Jean confided to her diary. “Could smell the gunpowder . . . stayed all day.”

Even at a distance of miles and years from the abduction, the Sutherlands are still second-guessing themselves about the kidnapping. Tom, for instance, muses on his fateful decision to dismiss the Lebanese militiamen who served as his bodyguards; Jean wonders out loud if she was responsible for the kidnapping: “It was clearly dangerous,” for Tom carped one of the talk-show hosts who interviewed her during Tom’s captivity. “Why did you let him go?”

But the heart and soul of the Sutherlands’ joint memoir is the long ordeal of confinement, and Tom and Jean allow us to witness their experience in harrowing detail.

Indeed, Tom and Jean each suffered a kind of slow-motion scourging. For Tom, who was locked away in a series of tiny apartments and basements, often blindfolded and chained, even the sound of children at play outside was an exquisite torture.

“Intriguing yet sad to know that I was so close to freedom and civilization,” Tom writes, “but so confined . . .”

Jean, who struggled heroically to keep Tom Sutherland from being forgotten, endured futile meetings with government officials and sometimes brutal interviews with the media. Just as Tom found comfort in his fellow hostages, Jean was strengthened by her solidarity with the “hostage wives.”

Sometimes the moments of frustration turn into something almost Kafkaesque, as when Jean applied to the Lebanese government to extend Tom’s residency and work permit even though he was being held as a prisoner in some unknown location. A bureaucrat in an East Beirut office coldly refused her request: “We have no proof that he’s in Lebanon,” he told Jean Sutherland.

“Somehow it just seemed terribly important that these [papers] be in order for him,” she recalls now. “I was glad later when the Lebanese government could not claim income tax from Tom’s AUB salary. They lost tens of thousands--served them right.”

The heartbreaking story of the Sutherlands has a happy ending, of course, and the whole book fairly glows with a sense of relief that their suffering is over. But the most compelling point that the Sutherlands make in “At Your Own Risk” is one that’s often overlooked in both journalism and history--the victims of terrorism are real people, and not just names and faces in the newspaper.

Thanks to the willingness of the Sutherlands to share their long ordeal with us in “At Your Own Risk,” we come to know these victims with an intimacy and a sense of shared experience that is rare indeed.