Former hostage Terry Waite said Saturday a biography of Franklin D. Roosevelt helped him make it through his ordeal.

Waite was given the Freedom of Worship award by the Franklin and Delano Roosevelt Institute in Hyde Park, N.Y., which has a satelline campus in this southern Dutch town, near the home of Roosevelt's forebears.He said he got the biography from his captors in Lebanon.

"It was a book full of interest and wisdom . . . material to meditate on the meaning of freedom," Waite said. Most of all, "It was an extremely thick book. And any prisoner is glad to get a large book."

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Waite was on a mission to free other Western hostages when he was kidnapped by Muslim militants in 1987 and held for nearly five years.

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