Customer Reviews

Thura's Diary: My Life in Wartime Iraq

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(6)

 

 

This book shares the thoughts of a college-age girl about the war in Iraq. It showed me how bad it truly is to be in a war. I encourage all young teens like me (I'm 14) to read this book.

THURA'S DIARY: My Life in Wartime Iraq
***** It tells the true story of the suffering endured through the bombing of Baghdad, June 17, 2004

I believe the uniqueness of this diary will fascinate readers of all ages. Thura wrote in her Diary " ...and every time a plane goes over our house the noise is indiscribable-unles you live with it, you cannot know it."

Iraqi people of all ages have suffered for over 40 years. The suffering varied in intensity and kind. Thura's and my experience are not different from those of other Iraqis. Like millions others I found it lifesaving to depart in 1982 my birth place, Baghdad, and since then I was not able to return back.

Thura was a 19 years teenager who found writing a diary is a way to control her chaotic war surroundings. Furthermore, the environment under which Iraqi children grew up is completely different from that in the West, one has to be careful what thoughts can be safe and sound to express. Hence, the short of substance and material some noted in Thura's diary should be excusable.

I found the diary rich with love and feelings towards her country, her younger sisters, parents, friends and all the people who were suffering from the war. She eloquently described the terrifying events she witnessed from 15th March, 2003 until the 26th of August when she was fortunate to be escorted out of Baghdad to America to finish her educatio n and fulfilling her and her parent's dreams.

One needs not to say again that millions of Iraqis of all ages have been living in hell that started decays ago. But keeping a diary by a 19 years old girl while her town, Baghdad, is bombarded and missiles flying over her home is a commendable effort. She took a real risk by starting this diary not knowing what the future will be.

Thura was fortunate to receive support from the journalists and the T.V. stations' correspondents, who got her story out. This was followed by an offer from the University of Pennsylvanian with full financial support. The future looks bright for this young writer.

My generation failed to make a viable change in Iraq. I wish Thura and her generation a peaceful and prosperous future.

I am a elementary school librarian. My sister-in-law sent me this book. She is a teacher at UPenn and she knows Thura as a student. I read it and decided it would make a fine lesson for the 5th graders. The lesson briefly explored The Diary of Anne Frank and Zlata's Diary. The students were most fascinated with Thura's Diary because they are familiar with the Iraq war and their own feelings about it. This unique perspective provided such a timely lesson! It was such a rich opportunity, I wish I had more time for discussion. We briefly explored issues about cultural/religious differences and similarities, what war feels like when you live in the war zone, what it is like to be a child in a war zone and how Americans are perceived by Iraqis. Many of the students wanted to check out my copy but I will have to buy a few more for the shelves, I am keeping mine!

If a score of zero was an option, this book would deserve it. It's either a fake, or written a very long time after the events. There is no feeling whatsoever of immediacy. There are only minimal cultural references - and these are simplistically explained for the dumb reader. It's painfully obvious that this so-called "diary" was written explicitly for a gullible, Western audience. If it were authentic, it would have far more cultural references, and it would have been full of footnotes. Weak. Shallow. Just awful.

Thura's Diary by Thura Al-Windawi is the diary of a nineteen year-old girl living in Iraq during the Iraqi War. She tells about changes in her life once American soldiers entered Iraq. Thura describes how she feels and what she sees during wartime Iraq. Also she explains changes for women. For example during the war especially women were being kidnapped if they weren't wearing a headscarf.
This book is really enjoyable and as a high school student it was really easy to connect with Thura. Thura's Diary gives you an idea of what it's like to live in a wartime country. Her book contains a lot of social value especially for Americans because you receive an idea of what is actually happening in Iraq from a young Iraqi woman's perspective. Like Jem in To Kill a Mockingbird Thura also realizes that she has to grow up to be strong for her seven year-old sister, Sama. This book is a good quick read and deserves three stars.

I read this as a required piece for a freshman sociology class in college. My class read this in depth, held class discussions several days, and wrote a six page paper on the book. I had serious problems writing a thoughtful, insightful paper on this book because I felt that there wasn't much there that wasn't written for an audience. Thura wrote what the audience wanted to hear. While many people find this a good book, I thought it might work better as a piece of fiction, such as the Dear America series of books. Actually, some of those have seemed more realistic than this book. It is a well written book; it just doesn't feel real. I can't remember the last time I explained simple games I play all of the time, or wrote in my diary as though my diary were about six years old.

I do not wish to trivialize the war experiences that Iraqi's have suffered. However, this book does not do justice to the many situations faced by war survivors. The book is trivial, poorly written, and has very little insight into the motives and effects of actions taken during the war.

I was disappointed by the short length. Being a journal keeper myself I can't say that I could have done any better in recording events as they occurred but in reading I still can't help but wish that there was more substance . . . more material. The whole story feels scarcely longer than an extended excerpt one might read in a magazine. Finishing the book, one wishes more had been said.

Like many people I watched the Iraqi War unfold, following the event as it was charted in unprecedented detail by the media. I was interested in Thura's Diary in learning how it was, on a personal level, for someone close to my own age who experienced it, as it were, from the other side of the video camera. But, in the end, I realized how narrow her story was. Thura Al-Windawi was there, but her story is only the story of a nineteen year old Iraqi girl from a comfortably well-off Shia family. It wasn't the story of the Kurd or the Sunni, or the young Iraqi man. Her story was real, but it was so little of the complete story. Her fears were real, but I couldn't help but wonder how well she understood the fears of others. In the book Al-Windawi relates a humorous incident where her father is teasing some younger relatives about being forcibly dragged off to fight. Her father makes the young men so nervous that when a little neighbor girl comes knocking on the door the men all take flight and run to hide in the river. The incident is humorous from this vantage point, but Al-Windawi seems to intellectually acknowledge the danger while not really personally grasping the terror a young Iraqi man would have facing the possibility of being forced to fight in a war.

Though I wished for a deeper and fuller exploration of life through this harrowing time I did sometimes find Thura Al-Windawi's innocence refreshing. In Thura's Diary she seems to relate to everyone with openness and a lack of hostility. I had to smile when she related an occasion when she was in Baghdad after it had fallen, and she met some Americans sitting in tanks. She says, "On the way I talked to an American soldier for the first time. He had bright blue eyes and I could tell he felt proud, sitting on top of his tank. I asked him why he was wearing a flak jacket, when the weather was so hot and no one was going to shoot at him now anyway. He told me it was a safety measure, in case someone shot at him from a distance. He seemed to be making fun of me, and his friends were laughing at him because he hadn't been expecting to meet an Iraqi girl who could speak English."

What I found most interesting about Thura's Diary was what it left out. The book is slim, and as much can be read between the lines as read in the actual pages. Al-Windawi relates the events of the Iraqi War and her feelings of terror, uncertainty, and hope. But she rarely divulges her thoughts or relates the thoughts of those around her. What does she and her family think of Saddam Hussein? What do they think of the condition of Iraq under his reign? There is a careful emptiness in the book . . . noticeable, but not surprising, considering much was written while Saddam Hussein was still in power. It is only in the end that a few glimmers of true thoughts begin to show through. Even then I was not sure how much Thura Al-Windawi knew, both about what happened in the recent history of Iraq, and what her own family--her own father--thought. Most revealing was what Al-Windawi related only at the very end of the book, in a postscript about the capture of Saddam Hussein. It is only there that she relates an e-mail from her father where he says that "Even though the regime had only ended recently, Saddam had died in the hearts of many Iraqis long ago."

This is the most shallow, superficial 'diary' I have ever read. No emotion, no detail, nothing. For what this girl supposedly went through, she seems pretty nonchalant. If you want to read a book that describes the war in Iraq with some real emotion, try "What Was Asked of Us...An Oral History of the Iraq War by the Soldiers Who Faught It."

So America got another young traitor who is supporting their slaughter of Iraqi people. I'm not suprised yet it still makes me angry. Why !?! Because this "diary from innocent girl" justify stealing oil from Iraq and other atrocities comitted by Americans. Is this girl really innocent? I don't think so. She is bloodthirsty when she happly writes about killing people who opposed American invasion. So there is no doubt why "free press" helped her move to USA while her countrymen and countrywomen are exposed to untold suffering.