MP3 Audios - Biography

Thomas Hargroves Long March to Freedom is a record of Hargroves eleven months as a hostage of Colombian guerrillas and was the basis for the recent movie hit Proof of Life that starred Meg Ryan, Russell Crowe, and David Morse.

While the movie invented a fictitious romantic angle, Long March to Freedom is the actual journal Hargrove kept in captivity, and the listener gets a sense of the intense emotions and the tension caused by bouts of monotony broken by sudden brutality as well as the strength,
wit, and personality through which Hargrove kept himself alive.

Thomas R. Hargrove was raised on a farm in Texas. He received degrees in agricultural science and journalism from Texas A&M University and a M.S. degree from Iowa State University. After serving in the U.S. Army in Vietnam, he worked with agencies involved in crop improvement for third-world countries, first in Asia then in Latin America. In 1994, he was on his way to work near Palmira, Colombia, when abducted.

Alan Sklar, a graduate of Dartmouth, has been a freelance voice actor for more than fifteen years. He has also worked as a stage actor and as a promo announcer at WPIX-TV in New York City. His dream is to be an opera singer, a role for which he hones his bass-baritone operatic skills in the upstairs shower of his home.