A Memoir by Zainab Salbi and Laurie Becklund
Publishers Weekly calls Between Two Worlds "the most honest account of life within Saddam's circle so far. It's an enlightening revelation of how, by barely perceptible stages, decent people make accommodations in a horrific regime." Only 11 years old when her father was chosen to serve as Saddam Hussein's personal pilot, Zainab and her family were often forced to spend weekends with Saddam where he watched their every move. Her mother eventually sent Zainab to America for an arranged marriage, but the marriage that was intended to save her turned out to be another world of tyranny and abuse. Zainab started over. She forged a new identity as a champion of women survivors of war and founded Women for Women International. Look for Between Two Worlds wherever books are sold.
United States Release
Between Two Worlds:
Escape from Tyranny: Growing Up in the Shadow of Saddam
United Kingdom Release
Hidden in Plain Sight: Growing up in the Shadow of Saddam
Read an Excerpt from Zainab's Book
"When I was growing up in Iraq, people used to refer to me as the 'pilot’s daughter'. I hated that term. I still do. It stole from me my very identity, everything I wanted to be. It defined me in terms of my father, and defined him, in turn, by his passenger: a despot millions of Iraqis feared … Because of a chain of events Saddam Hussein set in motion, I found myself stranded in America by the Gulf War. For very good reasons, I had come to trust no one, not even my mother. I had just turned twenty-one, and I found myself all alone for the first time as fresh new fears were heaped on all the old ones. I did what I needed to survive, though it was not nearly as simple as I make it sound: I erased the pilot’s daughter and started over. I creased my life down the middle like the spine of a book when you bend the pages back very hard. You could read the first half of the book of my life, then read the second half, and not know they were lived by the same person. I wanted it that way. I needed it that way."
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