Insightful! - Rated 
This book describes a situation which makes me greatful that I'm far away from such a place where such horrific things happen but sad that such unlawful things actually happened and maybe still happen to people who live not far from us.
The torture described is cruel and the worst part of it is that its unfair and unnecessary!
The author is very good at moving the described events forward quickly which encourages the reader to read on.
A good read.
The tip of the iceberg - Rated 
Mayada Al Askari was born in Iraq, in 1955, to a prominent Iraqi family, and is the granddaughter of Jido Sati, an important Iraqi politician and statesman in the first half of the 20th century, and of former Iraqi Prime Minister Jafar al-Askari.
This biography tells of her experiences growing up in the hellish cage of Baathist Iraq under Saddam Hussein's rule of fear.
Mayada was born, grew up, was married in, and gave birth to two children in Iraq.
She detested the Hitler of the Euphrates Saddam Hussein, and her one dream in life was to live to see the end of his rule.
The author Jean Sassoon visited a children's ward in a Baghdad hospital with Mayada, and knew that Saddam, who brought on the wares and sanctions, was the reason for these children's suffering. Saddam was so eager to lay the blame for infant deaths on the sanctions that he was known to hold back medicine from the hospitals- he might, for example, allow only one cancer drug to be issued for leukemia patients, who clearly required tow or three different drugs to battle certain cancers.
Saddam was also known to have placed empty baby coffins on the street to inflame world opinion against the United States (The international left lapping up Saddam's propaganda with enthusiasm , while never one uttering a word against his genocidal reign of terror).
Mayada ran a printing shop and was arrested on false charges that opposition material had been printed with her facilities.
She was imprisoned in Baladiyat, the headquarters of Saddam's secret police which also served as a prison cell.
Here she was tortured and witnessed deaths and maiming of the women in her cell by the most horrific tortures.
Many of these were imprisoned for no certified reason at all, and another was imprisoned, for example, for organizing a litter cleaning campaign, as this was then seen as an implicit criticism of the Saddam regime's administration.
Every woman was taken at least once a day for a torture session.
These women were beaten, whipped, burned, mutilated, dismembered, and gassed and electrocuted.
One method used was to insert a pipe into the victim and burn their insides with gas.
Were where the hypocritical 'anti-war' activists who hysterically pour venom against President George W Bush and Prime Minister Tony Blair for liberating Iraq, when Saddam was torturing his own people and murdering hundreds of thousands of others.
When American forces humiliated Iraqi Baathists, involved in terror, while doing nothing like what Saddam's cohorts did to thousands, the international left and media broke again into hysteria, but where were they when Saddam was involved in perpetration of these horrors.
In true Orwellian style they compared President Bush and Blair to Hitler when it was so clear that Saddam was the Hitler of the equation, and millions of Iraqis were jubilant at Saddam's downfall. The book, through detailing Mayada's conversation with some of her fellow prisoners, relates the cruelty of the Saddam Hussein family, including Saddam's torture and starvation of a pet dog, tied up next to a pool of water while being killed with thirst, all the while being given electric shocks by Saddam's sadistic son, Uday.
Everyone who has ever had an interest or comment in the Iraq War or who says that they do not know why President Bush removed Saddam would do well to educate themselves on something of Saddam's excesses.
This book gives us an insight but it is only the tip of the iceberg of the horrors perpetrated by the Saddam regime.
There's something missing - Rated
When it comes to autobiographical or biographical books, like this one, and the events recounted are mainly dramatic and very sad, the impulse is to rate it with 5 stars. However, I find that this particular book, or rather, its narrative, seems to be lacking that something or other which would put the whole thing into a more tangible perspective. Of course one cannot but sympathise with Mayada and all the "shadow women" and what they went through as described (imprisonment and torture in Iraq).
However this time, and unlike some previous work I read by the same author, I felt that the book lacks in substance a bit, some points have not been explained clearly and, in my opinion, the frequent descriptions of Mayada's fortunate background blur some more fundamental issues.
A Book That Makes You Think - Rated
This is a well-written true story about a woman called Mayada who lived in Iraq throughout the rule of Saddam Hussein. It vividly describes the privileged position Mayada had in a rich Iraqui family, and through this, how she went from being one of Saddam's 'favoured' to being thrown into one of his many torture prisons.
Despite the author being obviously pro-US throughout the book, it is very well written book and depicts Mayada's life with dignity and respect.
The only downfall of this book is that there are so many books on sale at the moment that are 'true stories' about people's plights in difficult situations. This book could be easily overlooked because of this, which is a great shame.
Better than Princess - Rated
If you can get over Sasson's 'the Iraqis are so grateful to the US for being liberated' tone, this is a much better book. For a start Mayada is a real person, from a family with a very real and interesting history.
I am very sceptical of Sasson's honesty, she has a tendency to write what she feels people want to read and is not above a little embelishment here and there (or a great deal of embelishment as in the case of Princess). I have no reason to doubt the stories told by the shadow women, and if true such stories deserve to be told. I found one discrepency, which when coupled with the account given of Mayada's release point to the possibility that whilst she was imprisoned, she, herself, wasn't tortured. So her personal torture scene was likely an embelishment on behalf of the author.
Some of the details given of torture techniques and the beaurocracy involved in processing prisoners add to the authenticity of the accounts. It was a disturbing book, although for such a gruelling and complex topic, it would have been better handled by a more skilled and accurate biographer.
|
