Mayada : Daughter of Iraq - Softcover

SASSON Jean

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0385607261 ISBN 13: 9780385607261

Publisher: Doubleday, 2003

Synopsis

Mayada Al-Askari was born into a powerful Iraqi family. One grandfather fought alongside Lawrence of Arabia, the other is acclaimed as the first Arab nationalist. Her uncle was Prime Minister for nearly forty years, her mother an important politician. When Saddam Hussein and his Ba'ath Party seized power, and instituted his reign of terror, Mayada found herself alone in Baghdad, a divorced parent of two children, earning a meagre living printing brochures. Until one morning in August 1999 she was summarily arrested and dragged to the notorious Baladiyat Prison, falsely accused of printing anti-government propaganda. There she was thrown into a stinking cell already housing seventeen other 'shadow women'. Like latter-day Schehrazades, these women passed their days, while waiting for the next interrogation and torture session, telling each other their stories. They were eager to hear Mayada's stories of her privileged former life, of the history of her proud family, of kings and queens, of meetings with Saddam himself. Not only the story of a woman intimately connected to Iraq's cultured, ancient history, this book is a powerful witness to the terror and horror wrought by Saddam

About this title

About the Author:

Jean Sasson is the author of the worldwide bestsellers Princess, Daughters of Arabia, Desert Royal and Mayada, Daughter of Iraq. She lived in Saudi Arabia for twelve years before moving back to the USA in 1990. She has recently returned to live in the Middle East.

From Publishers Weekly:

When author Sasson (Esther's Child; Princess Sultana's Circle; etc.) was assigned Mayada Al-Askari as a translator on a 1998 trip to Baghdad, she had no idea she would form a lasting friendship with this fluent English-speaker and member of a prominent Iraqi family. When Sasson returned to the United States, the two women wrote letters and telephoned each other weekly until, in 1999, Mayada was arrested by Saddam Hussein's secret police for allegedly printing anti-regime pamphlets in her Baghdad print shop and imprisoned for nearly a month in Iraq's brutal Baladiyat Prison. Sasson's candid, straightforward account of Mayada's time among the 17 "shadow women" crammed into Cell 52 gives readers a glimpse of the cruelty and hardship endured by generations of Iraqis. Mayada stares down this ugliness as soon as she's yanked from her meticulously run shop into the prison's interrogation room: "She saw chairs with bindings, tables stacked high with various instruments of torture.... But the most frightening pieces of... equipment were the various hooks that dangled from the ceiling. When Mayada glanced to the floor beneath those hooks, she saw splashes of fresh blood, which she supposed were left over from the torture sessions she had heard during the night." Sasson's graceful handling of such stomach-turning material, including an overview of Iraq's political and social turmoil, is a tribute to her friend, who escaped to Jordan with her children soon after her release from prison. Although Mayada's story has a happy ending, the unclear fates of her cell mates serve as a painful reminder of how many innocent lives were cut short by Hussein's regime.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Doubleday
• Publication date: 2003
• ISBN 10: 0385607261
• ISBN 13: 9780385607261
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 336