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19 of 20 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
The Hard Life and Strange Death of an Iraqi General, February 3, 2009
This review is from: The Weight of a Mustard Seed: The Intimate Story of an Iraqi General and His Family During Thirty Years of Tyranny (Hardcover)
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It's hard not to feel positively toward a writer who risks traveling to dangerous places in the pursuit of journalism. An Anglo-American woman who lived for months at a time in post-Ba'athist Iraq, during the most dangerous phase of the terrorist uprising, deserves double kudos. Though not fluent in Arabic - she refers several times to depending on translators - Wendell Steavenson has gleaned from interviews with many Iraqis this impressionistic and episodic account of the career of General Kamel Sachet Aziz al-Janabi, who rose high in the ranks of Saddam Hussein's military before being executed for unknowable reasons in December 1998.
As a picture of the turbulence and precariousness of life in the upper ranks of the Saddamite regime, The Weight of a Mustard Seed is admirable. Unfortunately, Miss Steavenson's informants, primarily General Sachet's family and close friends, provide more specifics about his private than his public life, and overlay their data with apologias. His roles in the Iran-Iraq War and the invasion of Kuwait remain cloudily heroic. His tenure as a provincial governor is praised for relieving oppression and attending to the needs of the poor. Yet the incompetence of the Iraqi Army, as well as its resort to chemical weapons, is notorious, and Sachet governed a province whose wetlands were being drained to destroy the lifeways of the rebellious Marsh Arabs. Was the hero a shining light of competence and rectitude against this dark background? Maybe, but the author does little to question or probe the encomia of her sources.
Also left unclear is the extent to which her narrative is founded on solid fact rather than her own speculative imagination. She presents not just verbatim conversations but the inner thoughts and psychological states of Sachet and others. How far has she extrapolated? How much have the portraits of Moslems brought up under a capricious tyranny been reshaped by the mentality of footloose, liberated Western journalist whose acquaintance with Islam appears not to be the deepest? (She thinks, for instance, that "Hadith" is the title of a book.)
There is, to tell the truth, a certain 30-going-on-13 quality to the writing: breathless, comma-free sentences, adolescent platitudes about the banality of evil, portentous references to Solzhenitsyn and Hannah Arendt and Primo Levi, a limited historical horizon. The author keeps asking, "How could such things have happened?" It never occurs to her than reading the history of the Middle East might reveal more than pop-science articles about contrived psychological experiments.
The climax of the book is General Sachet's mysterious death. Contemporary rumor claimed that Saddam's son Qusay shot him personally. Miss Steavenson refutes that tale by finding a witness to the execution, carried out at Abu Ghraib by a Presidential Guard firing squad. The government never proffered any explanation beyond an accusation of unspecified "treason". None of the author's interviewees can add anything but guesswork. It's conceivable that Sachet, who had turned increasingly to Wahhabi-style piety, was involved in Saudi plots to replace Saddam with a more stable figure. Or he may have been the victim of mere tyrannical impulse. That Saddam later paid compensation to the general's family and left them free, in relatively prosperous circumstances, hints at the latter.
Half a decade later, General Sachet's sons joined the terrorist campaign against democracy in Iraq. At least one has been killed in action. Are they rebelling against their father or following in his footsteps? Frustratingly, this book doesn't help us decide. Nonetheless, despite its adolescent superficiality, it serves as a good reminder of how monstrous Saddam's rule was and why, whether or not Miss Steavenson believes it, Iraq is a happier land without him.
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7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
very insightful, January 28, 2009
This review is from: The Weight of a Mustard Seed: The Intimate Story of an Iraqi General and His Family During Thirty Years of Tyranny (Hardcover)
Customer review from the Amazon Vine™ Program (What's this?)
"The weight of a mustard seed", written by Wendell Steavenson, is a book that is well worth the read for individuals who wish to gather a sense of what it was like living in Iraq under the rule of Saddam Hussein. In this expansive story which covers multiple decades of the life of who was to become General Kamel Sachet, the author describes various events throughout his life as explained by third person observers. The was, in my opinion, a very good, sound addition to the literature. In a quite subjective manner, Steavenson writes, often in a flower-esque manner various events of his life. Other reviewers criticize that this book apologizes for Sachet's role in atrocities committed by the Hussein regime. It does. That's part of the fascination with this book. It helps us, neutral third parties, to see a different perspective than our own. That's cool and it is achieved quite effectively. It is also noted by another reviewer that the only references to the United States were negative. While I hold tremendous honor and respect for the brave men and women of the United States military who have risked or, in many cases, given their lives, I also believe that the point of this book is to transport the reader to a different perspective, a different culture, a different belief system. It really does help to know the world around us and its peoples. It might be understandable, in my mind, to hear statements that are negative about the United States, following two major military actions and hundreds of minor military actions over the last 18 years and after hundreds of thousands of Iraqi soldiers died in almost unilateral military conflict with the United States. I felt that there was some sense of diminished responsibility on his behalf that was argued in the book because of the terroristic crazy regime in which Sachet found himself. While sort of understandable, it is hard for me to ultimately mitigate, in my mind, his role in some of the atrocities committed by the Hussein regime. It's an excellent read for those who are willing to allow their minds to be tugged beyond what they've been told to believe. I give this book an A-. I think that the writer has tremendous potential and I look forward to reading future works by her.
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8 of 10 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
Too graphic, insufficiently supported, and generally bad, April 1, 2009
This review is from: The Weight of a Mustard Seed: The Intimate Story of an Iraqi General and His Family During Thirty Years of Tyranny (Hardcover)
Customer review from the Amazon Vine™ Program (What's this?)
I really expected to be fascinated with this book ... not necessarily to enjoy reading it, but to discover interesting and useful information that could help make sense out of the senseless. Unfortunately, that's not what's here.
In fact, after only a hundred pages, I just didn't have the stomach for more. I set the book aside, determined to come back and finish it only because it was an Amazon Vine pre-read and I felt obligated to trudge through the remaining pages and post a review. Even when I at last made it to the end, I didn't feel enlightened, didn't feel I understood any more, just felt like I'd wasted precious time in an icky place that wasn't even well enough documented to feel certain its darkness was accurately portrayed.
No one expects a book subtitled, "An Iraqi General's Moral Journey During the Time of Saddam" to be a pretty little story. Even so, I expected more introspection and less graphic violence. Detailed portrayals of battles seen on television don't succeed in conveying the promised "moral journey". And, while I realize that getting interviews with the Iraqi general in question was problematic, I rather hoped to have met him in person (in print, of course!) by the time I'd read a third of the way into the book. I hadn't.
Further, I acknowledge that finding and sharing evidence to support the source stories would be incredibly challenging, and that there's a need to protect many sources currently living in Iraq. At the same time, I'm a bit disappointed by the extent to which the story so far is pure undocumented hearsay, usually second- or even third-hand.
There's more I could say, but I've really spent quite enough time with this author already, and just want to be done with it. So, no more writing at the moment!
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