Between Two Worlds : Escape From Tyranny : Growing Up in the Shadow of Saddam [Bargain Price] [Hardcover]

Zainab Salbi (Author), Laurie Becklund (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 6, 2005

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.

“…a powerful portrait of an ordinary Iraqi family reluctantly entangled in Saddam Hussein's world, forced to live on the palace grounds, an unsettling place where dark secrets are unearthed, one after the other…But after Zainab finds the courage to escape, and to fight persecution in an abusive arranged marriage, she ultimately creates a new life where she dedicates herself to female victims worldwide. Zainab's inspiring story is a gripping combination of fear, humanity, and personal strength."
--Jean Sasson, author of the #1 international bestseller, Mayada, Daughter of Iraq

--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Starred Review. 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 © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Booklist

Salbi, president of Women for Women International, an activist group for women caught up in war, had an unusual childhood: her secular, educated parents, part of Iraq's elite society, were trapped in Saddam Hussein's extended circle, and she grew up spending weekends at a house "Amo" Hussein purchased for her family and going to extravagant parties thrown by the leader and attended by his sons. Naively enjoying the perks at first, she grew up to realize that the socioeconomic privilege came at extraordinary personal cost. Salbi calmly but frankly looks back on those years, some of which were marked by war between Iraq and Iran, cataloging her growing awareness of the terrible hold Hussein had on her family, especially on her mother, who, in an attempt to save Salbi from Hussein's grasp, married her to an Iraqi stranger in America who became abusive. Relayed without stridency or bitterness, this compelling memoir is not only a story of personal success but also a fascinating glimpse at a fanatical leader, who, in his quest for power, sacrificed his own people. Stephanie Zvirin
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 304 pages
• ISBN-10: 1592401562
• ASIN: B000FTWB0I
• Product Dimensions: 8.2 x 5.4 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 13.6 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (35 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,442,230 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

44 of 44 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Speaking truth to power, October 7, 2005

By 

Amy Tiemann "creator of www.MojoMom.com" (North Carolina, USA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Between Two Worlds: Escape From Tyranny : Growing Up in the Shadow of Saddam (Hardcover)

After founding Women for Women International, an organziation that empowers women survivors of war to rebuild their lives after conflict, Zainab Salbi found the courage and voice to tell her own story of growing up in Iraq under Saddam Hussein's control. Salbi's family was trapped in Hussein's inner circle through her father's role as Saddam's airplane pilot. Through her riveting narrative the reader comes to understand that no one in Iraq was safe from Saddam's wrath and destructive appetites. Salbi's searingly honest writing has helped her conquer a lifelong struggle to claim her own identity. Even years after founding WFWI, on a return trip to Iraq she could feel the old, despised label of being known as the "pilot's daughter" clinging to her. With her work and now her writing, Zainab Salbi has shown the transformative power of shining an illuminating light of truth-telling into the dark corners of secrecy and fear. Weaving her family's story with women's history and Iraq's political history, Salbi has created an emotional, beautifully-written, timely and relevant memoir.

30 of 32 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars An extraordinary woman, October 12, 2005

By 

Alison Burke (Herndon VA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Between Two Worlds: Escape From Tyranny : Growing Up in the Shadow of Saddam (Hardcover)

I volunteered for Zainab Salbi's organization back in 1997 and interviewed her for a Washington Times article in 2003. Not knowing these details of her personal story, I was inspired by her strong spirit and work on behalf of oppressed women around the world and found her extraordinary. I had no idea, sitting across from this accomplished, engaging woman, that her life also held such painful secrets. Her book is a gift to its readers and a much-needed voice for Iraqi women.

20 of 20 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars An evocative and haunting memoir about growing up in Baghdad under Saddam Hussein, November 2, 2005

By 

Bookreporter (New York, New York) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Between Two Worlds: Escape From Tyranny : Growing Up in the Shadow of Saddam (Hardcover)

Zainab Salbi --- founder and president of Women for Women International, a non-profit organization created in 1993 to provide female survivors of war and genocide with the tools and resources necessary to move forward with their lives --- has written an engrossing memoir about growing up in Baghdad beneath Saddam Hussein's watchful eye. With her mother's journals as her guide and the help of Los Angeles Times reporter Laurie Becklund, Salbi painstakingly chronicles the humiliating subjugation that she and her family endured (both in Iraq and later in America) and provides a unique inside perspective into a conflict that is sadly still going on to this day.

From the time she was a child, Salbi and her family lived in constant fear of Saddam Hussein. In 1969, when she was 11 years old, her father was appointed to be his personal pilot. Because of this prestigious promotion, Saddam's presence in their home became increasingly commonplace, so much so that she and her family were instructed to call him "Amo," the Iraqi word for "Uncle." They were invited to parties at Saddam's palace and, in some of his more "merciful moments," were given lavish gifts, including a house on the palace grounds where they could spend their weekends. "But [Salbi] came to understand that these moments would be followed by months of excruciating, often mystifying punishment." Their movements were monitored. Their freedom to travel and pray was severely limited. Any difference in opinion from what Saddam believed was strictly forbidden. Although they looked to outsiders as though they were living in the lap of luxury, she and her family were trapped in an oppressive, highly controlled lifestyle with no likely means of escape.

It took years for her and her family to get out from under Saddam's influence, and even then, they could never completely break away. Salbi's mother and father became estranged after years of enduring Saddam's torture, and eventually divorced. Salbi suffered through a disastrous engagement, an abusive arranged marriage to an Iraqi man thirteen years her senior in America, and years of emotional damage before she finally met a man whom she could trust enough to begin a life with. A few of Salbi's aunts (like many Iraqi women) had been harassed or raped by Saddam, Uday, or any number of the Mukhabarat, and would never fully come to terms with the terror and humiliation they felt at the hands of Saddam and his men.

So why didn't they leave? Why didn't they get out in the beginning before things got too harried? Even before the Gulf War began, couldn't they see that Saddam would never stop until it was too late? Hadn't they learned from history's disastrous examples, such as what happened during the regimes of Stalin or Hitler? "That question haunts whole generations of people from around the world whose parents tolerated the rise of dictatorship."

Zainab Salbi and her family's horrifying experiences when living in Iraq under Saddam's brutal reign are shocking but not uncommon. Countless numbers of frightened people are living out similar nightmares in Iraq, the Sudan, and war-torn countries the world over. In 1993, Salbi formed Women for Women International in order to fight against these atrocities and to help women like herself heal from the life-altering wounds that were inflicted upon them. Later, she would pen BETWEEN TWO WORLDS, this evocative and haunting memoir that proves that one courageous woman can rise above her own painful past in order to make a difference in the lives of others.

In the Afterword, Salbi writes, "...In the end there was a point at which I felt that I had to take ownership of my voice, my truth, and my story. I felt I had lived through other women's stories and through their courage in breaking their truths. Perhaps, it was my turn to take that jump and to speak up. So, here I am, taking ownership of my story and telling it."

--- Reviewed by Alexis Burling