Zainab Salbi was eleven years old when her father was chosen to be Saddam Hussein's personal pilot and her family's life was grafted onto his. Her mother, the beautiful Alia, taught her daughter the skills she needed to survive. A plastic smile. Saying yes. Burying in boxes in her mind the horrors she glimpsed around her. Learn to erase your memories, she instructed. He can read eyes.

In this richly visual memoir, Salbi describes tyranny as she saw it--through the eyes of a privileged child, a rebellious teenager, a violated wife, and ultimately a public figure fighting to overcome the skill that once kept her alive: silence.

Between Two Worlds is a riveting quest for truth that deepens our understanding of the universal themes of power, fear, sexual subjugation, and the question one generation asks the one before it: How could you have let this happen to us? BACKCOVER: Praise for Between Two Worlds:

...a torrent of vividly recalled memories that] reads with the sort of artless verve that can come only from one who's been unshackled from a lifetime of repression.

aVogue

A remarkable, astonishing memoir...more can be learned about Iraq from this book than from all the newscasts.

aAlice Walker, author of The Color Purple

aA country unravels and a loving family dissolves in Zainab Salbi's riveting, beautifully observed memoir...This is the exquisite if often painful story of Salbi's own emergence from victim to global activist on behalf of women survivors of violence and war everywhere. I guarantee you won't be able to put it down.a

aEllen Chesler, author of Woman of Valor: Margaret Sanger and the Birth Control Movement in America

aA personal, intimate look at the soul-crushing impact of Husseinas Iraq. . . . Salbi deploys a straightforward, easy prose that is powerful in its simplicity. . . . Now, with her chilling memoir, the lies end.a

aThe Washington Post

aSalbi has direct personal knowledge of Hussein that is both insightful and disturbing.a

aMs. magazine

aEngrossing. . . . a unique insider perspective . . . an evocative and haunting memoir that proves that one courageous woman can rise above her own painful past in order to make a difference in the lives of others.a

aBookreporter.com

aA remarkable tale of emotional and mental resilience.a

aBookpage

a. . . a steadfast visionary spirit prevails, rendered with remarkable literary skill and complex personalities.a

aBust

The highly anticipated memoir from the daughter of Saddam Hussein's personal pilot is an unforgettable story of survival, strength, and one woman's struggle against tyranny.

A native of Iraq who arrived in the United States at the age of twenty, Zainab Salbi is the founder and president of Women for Women International, a nonprofit organization dedicated to providing women of war and civil unrest with the resources to become self-sufficient citizens and promote peace.

Laurie Becklund is an award-winning Los Angeles journalist and author. This is her third collaboration. A former Los Angeles Times,/I> reporter, she wrote the first story about Salbi in 1991, when Salbi was a young woman stranded in America by the Gulf War.