Zainab Salbi
Author of Between Two Worlds: Escape from Tyranny: Growing Up in the Shadow of Saddam and The Other Side of War: Women's Stories of Survival & Hope, founder & President of Women for Women International.

Author of Between Two Worlds: Escape from Tyranny: Growing Up in the Shadow of Saddam and The Other Side of War: Women's Stories of Survival & Hope, founder & President of Women for Women International.

Zainab Salbi inspires audiences with her personal experience as a survivor of war and her dedication to rebuilding war-torn communities, one woman at a time.

Between Two Worlds: Escape from Tyranny: Growing Up in the Shadow of Saddam
"...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." - Vogue

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?

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