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.

Between Two Worlds: Escape From Tyranny: Growing Up in the Shadow of Saddam

FROM THE PUBLISHER

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

FROM THE CRITICS

Lynne Duke - The Washington Post

The Baathist reign of terror is well-trod literary territory, but Salbi delivers much in Between Two Worlds that is freshly poignant and newly galling. Hers is a personal, intimate look at the soul-crushing impact of Hussein's Iraq. Writing with journalist Laurie Becklund, Salbi deploys a straightforward, easy prose that is powerful in its simplicity.

Publishers Weekly

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 2005 Reed Business Information.

Library Journal

With the help of journalist Becklund, Salbi (founder and president, Women for Women International) here aims to document her privileged yet harrowing life in her native Iraq, recounting her memories of family friend Saddam Hussein. She demonstrates that the mechanisms of terror practiced by Saddam's tyrannical regime rendered her so impaired that she could not protest. Nor could she voice her people's suffering even when she moved to America in 1991. This book provides very important observations about Saddam's character and his ability to intimidate even close friends. The author vividly describes her late liberation from his "charm" even as she insists on calling him by one of the loveliest names used by Iraqis, "Uncle." Here we see how fear could lead to blind loyalty and exaggerated demonstrations of love. Through a journey colored with loss and hope, readers encounter a story of self-awakening and of realizing the will to live and survive. Recommended for public libraries. [See Prepub Alert, LJ 6/1/05.]-Sadiq Alkoriji, Tomball Coll. & Community Lib., Harris Cty., TX Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews

"He was handsome and charming-no one who meets him ever denies he is attractive." Thus Saddam Hussein, up close and personal. The quotation comes from the diary of Salbi's mother, Alia, a vivacious secular Iraqi whose husband, Salbi's father, was an airline pilot turned advisor on aviation matters, and for a time the former Iraqi leader's personal pilot. "Technically," Salbi writes, "[Saddam] was just my father's employer," but he was a friend of sorts, too; "Uncle" liked to show up at their home late at night with a few boxes of Chivas Regal to talk and dance the night away. He was jovial in those days, too, though he confided to Alia that he had killed one of his mistresses when she became involved with another man, never a good strategy with a murderous dictator. The message did not go unheard, and who could deny the leader whatever he wanted? Thus was the milieu in which Salbi grew up, though there is much more to her memoir than all that. She affectingly describes, for example, her childhood discovery of sectarian frictions when a Sunni classmate begins to shun her ("He made me feel like I had cooties"); more strongly still, she recounts the loss of another childhood friendship to politics when a young classmate's father runs afoul of and is dispatched by the Ba'athist regime. "By the time I met the man who ordered her father's execution three years later," she writes, "I had taught myself to forget her last name." Childhood passes, and when Hussein begins to take closer interest in the adolescent Salbi, her parents send her off to an arranged marriage in America, where she finds herself more or less exiled at the outbreak of the Gulf War-and therein lies another story of challengeovercome. Though the writing is flat, Salbi's story has value for those hoping to understand the strangeness and ubiquity of Saddam's regime.