Between Two Worlds: Escape From Tyranny : Growing Up in the Shadow of Saddam
Books / Hardcover
Books › Biography & Autobiography › Personal Memoirs
ISBN: 1592401562 / Publisher: Gotham, October 2005
The daughter of Saddam Hussein's personal pilot describes her experiences of growing up as a palace insider, recounting how Hussein forced those closest to him to compete for his approval, her escape from Iraq through an abusive arranged marriage, and her efforts at the head of a non-profit organization to benefit oppressed women and female war victims. 40,000 first printing.
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Zainab Salbi was eleven years old when her father was chosen to be Saddam Hussein's personal pilot and her family's life was grafted onto his. Her mother, the beautiful Alia, taught her daughter the skills she needed to survive. A plastic smile. Saying yes. Burying in boxes in her mind the horrors glimpsed around her. "Learn to erase your memories," she instructed. "He can read eyes."In this memoir, a global leader in the fight on behalf of women victims of war reveals ties to a dictator that fear had kept sealed up inside her for years. She describes tyranny as she saw it - through the eyes of a privileged child, a rebellious teenager, a violated wife, and ultimately a public figure fighting to overcome the skill that once kept her alive: silence.Zainab was just twenty when her mother talked her into an arranged marriage in America. She found herself wed to an abusive stranger and fled. Stranded by the Gulf War, unaware that her mother had sent her away to save her from Saddam's growing affection, she started over. Only when Alia was dying did Salbi realize that she had gone to war zones around the world asking other women for answers that her mother had all along.Between Two Worlds is a quest for truth that deepens our understanding of the universal themes of power, fear, sexual subjugation, and the question one generation asks the one before it: How could you have let this happen to us? Why, the child in Salbi needed to know, didn't her father just fly her away?
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