Zainab Salbi is the founder and president of Women for Women International, a nonprofit organization dedicated to providing women of war and civil unrest with the resources to become self-sufficient citizens and promote peace. She holds degrees from George Mason University and the London School of Economics, and she has publicized her work widely in the media, including six appearances on Oprah.
Laurie Becklund is a Los Angeles journalist and author. A former Los Angeles Times reporter, she wrote the first story about Salbi in 1991, when Zainab was a young woman stranded in America after a failed marriage during the Gulf War.
The question "why did they stay?" haunts this engrossing memoir, as Salbi shows how Saddam Hussein "managed to make decent people like [her] parents complicit in their own oppression." "Growing up in Baghdad," the author remembers, "was probably not unlike growing up in an American suburb," but then Salbi's father became Saddam's private pilot. Gradually, the man who treated her like a niece became a man she called " `Amo' [Uncle] not out of affection, but because I was afraid to say his name-Saddam Hussein-out loud." Interspersed with Salbi's memories are her mother's recollections of imposed visits from and disquieting parties with Saddam. These riveting passages reveal a self-absorbed man who, as Salbi comes to understand, "saw no conflict between feeling fondness for people and killing them." Making a physical escape from Iraq was easy-a marriage was arranged in the U.S. to an abusive husband (from whom Salbi also had to escape)-compared with making the new life that culminated in founding Women for Women International, an organization that assists women victimized by war. Books to come will offer more historical and statistical data, but this may be the most honest account of life within Saddam's circle so far; not a rebel's account, although Salbi is certainly a dissident, rather, it's an enlightening revelation of how, by barely perceptible stages, decent people make accommodations in a horrific regime. (Oct.) Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.
Salbi knew Saddam's tyranny firsthand: her father was his pilot. An arranged marriage in the United States was meant to save her from Saddam's unfortunate affection but instead led to abuse. Salbi escaped again to found Women for Women International, which aids female victims of war. You've seen her on TV with everyone from Jim Lehrer to Oprah. With a national tour. Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.
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