Between Two Worlds by Zainab Salbi

From The Week of January 30, 2011

In this vivid piece, Ms. Salbi describes an Iraq few of us in the West can imagine. It is an Iraq of her parents' generation, an Iraq before Saddam, an Iraq of culture and style. It is an Iraq which is perverted and then destroyed by the ego of one man and the will of Iraqis to follow him. Between Two Worlds is the anatomy of a nation's disintegration into a tyranny so ugly and profound that its ripple effects can be seen in the Iraq of the 21st century.

By Ms. Salbi's account, she had a childhood much like many in the West. Born to loving parents, she grew up comfortable with herself and her freedoms in a sane-ish and secular state. Her father, a commercial pilot, provided for the family while her mother raised her and her siblings with warmth and confidence. But when Saddam Hussein rose to power in the late 1970s, this normal life was replaced by an existence far more terrifying. Ms. Salbi's parents socialized in a circle quite near to the new Iraqi leader. As a consequence, they were drawn into Hussein world of lavish parties, stupendous excesses and perverse passions. While, publicly, he was leading Iraq into a disastrous war with Iran, privately, he toyed with those around him, dominating them, breaking them. Caught in an abusive relationship they were too afraid to end, Ms. Salbi watched her parents ruin themselves on Hussein's altar of sacrifice, unable to find a way out of his cruelty.

This is an intense memoir which spends as much time chronicling the cruelty of a dictator as it does with Ms. Salbi's own story which is fascinating and complex. Pressured by her parents to flee Iraq and marry in America, Ms. Salbi describes her own terror and abuse at the hands of a dictatorial husband. But soon enough, she finds her way out of her own darkness and into the light of activism which takes her into the world's most dangerous conflicts, to help improve the plight of women shattered by war. In this way, Ms. Salbi's star ascends even while her country's flickers and threatens to go out.

Incredible work. Ms. Salbi's portrait of Saddam Hussein captures the Hitlerian cruelty of a man perfectly willing to allow his people to suffer for the furtherance of his own glory. But while the stories she tells of her adolescence spent near this dictator are memorable and noteworthy, her own journey is equally as potent. To flee ones homeland for an abusive marriage, only to escape that plight and transform oneself into a crusader for women annihilated by war is both commendable and astonishing. As admirable as it is unforgettable. (4/5 Stars)