Between Two Worlds: Escape from Tyranny: Growing Up in the Shadow of Saddam » (Reprint)

A native of Iraq who arrived in the United States at the age of twenty, 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.

Laurie Becklund is an award-winning Los Angeles journalist and author. This is her third collaboration. A former Los Angeles Times,/I> reporter, she wrote the first story about Salbi in 1991, when Salbi was a young woman stranded in America by the Gulf War.

Zainab Salbi was eleven years old when her father was chosen to serve as Saddam Hussein's personal pilot, her family often forced to spend weekends with Saddam where he watched their every move. As a palace insider, Zainab offers a singular glimpse of what it is like to come of age under a dictator and provides an intimate portrait of the man she was taught to call "uncle." She watched as Saddam pitted friends, spouses, and even children against each other to compete for his approval. She was sent to donate her mother's jewelry to one of the world's richest men, asked to erase her memory as she heard of crimes she was not supposed to hear of, and witnessed her mother hiding her tears lest it upset Saddam. Her mother eventually sent Zainab to America for an arranged marriage, to spare her from Saddam's growing affection, but the marriage intended to save her turned out to be another world of tyranny and abuse.

Despite extraordinary psychological challenges, Zainab started over. She forged a new identity as a champion of female victims of war, dedicating her life to speaking out on behalf of oppressed women around the world. Her unique nonprofit organization has been featured in the media numerous times, including multiple appearances by Zainab on The Oprah Winfrey Show. But until now, Zainab has never told this very personal tale. In this intimate portrait, she reveals the tyrant through the eyes of a child, a secretly rebellious teenager, an abused wife, and ultimately a professional woman coming to terms with the horror of secrets her mother revealed only on her deathbed. Through her ability to come to terms with the child she used to be and the dangerous world in which she managed to survive, Between Two Worlds emerges as a story of heroism like no other

The Washington Post - Lynne Duke

The Baathist reign of terror is well-trod literary territory, but Salbi delivers much in Between Two Worlds that is freshly poignant and newly galling. Hers is a personal, intimate look at the soul-crushing impact of Hussein's Iraq. Writing with journalist Laurie Becklund, Salbi deploys a straightforward, easy prose that is powerful in its simplicity.