That was Nov. 20, 2001. Slahi’s mother has since died. Her son has never returned. He had begun, that fall day two months after 9/11, what he calls his “endless world tour,” courtesy of the various American national security bureaucracies, traveling, after a week of interrogation in Mauritania, via “extraordinary rendition” to a black site in Jordan, where he was interrogated, sometimes brutally, for eight months; thence he is flown, blindfolded, shackled and diapered, to Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan, for two weeks of interrogation; and finally, to Guantánamo, where he suffered months of strictest isolation, weeks of sleep deprivation, extremes of temperature and sound, and other elaborate tortures set out in a “special plan” approved personally by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld — and where he remains to this day. He composed these memoirs in his isolation cell in the summer of 2005, and a six-year legal battle has finally brought them to us. Written in the colloquial if limited English he picked up during his captivity, its pages disfigured with thousands of pitch-black “redactions” courtesy of the American intelligence agents who play such major parts, the work is a kind of dark masterpiece, a sometimes unbearable epic of pain, anguish and bitter humor that the Dostoyevsky of “The House of the Dead” would have recognized and embraced.