Between Two Worlds

Lynne Duke

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.
— The Washington Post

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.