Purchase
A Family Story of Survival in Iraq
Doubleday
June 2007
On Sale: June 19, 2007
368 pages
ISBN: 0385521219
EAN: 9780385521215
Hardcover
Add to Wish List
Non-Fiction
In the winter of 1979 Nabeel Yasin, Iraq's most famous young
poet, gathered together a handful of belongings and fled
Iraq with his wife and son. Life in Baghdad had become
intolerable. Silenced by a series of brutal beatings at the
hands of the Ba'ath Party's Secret Police and declared an
“enemy of the state,” he faced certain death if he stayed. Nabeel had grown up in the late 1950s and early '60s in a
large and loving family, amid the domestic drama typical of
Iraq's new middle class, with his mother Sabria working as a
seamstress to send all of her seven children to college. As
his story unfolds, Nabeel meets his future wife and finds
his poetic voice while he is a student. But Saddam's rise to
power ushers in a new era of repression, imprisonment and
betrayal from which few families will escape intact. In this
new climate of intimidation and random violence Iraqis live
in fear and silence; yet Nabeel’s mother tells him “It is
your duty to write.” His poetry, a blend of myth and
history, attacks the regime determined to silence him. As
Nabeel’s fame and influence as a poet grows, he is forced
into hiding when the Party begins to dismantle the city’s
infrastructure and impose power cuts and food rationing. Two
of his brothers are already in prison and a third is used as
a human minesweeper on the frontline of the Iran-Iraq war.
After six months in hiding, Nabeel escapes with his wife and
young son to Beirut, Paris, Prague, Budapest, and finally
England. Written by Jo Tatchell, a journalist who has spent many
years in the Middle East and who is a close friend of Nabeel
Yasin’s, Nabeel's Song is the gripping story of a family and
its fateful encounter with history. From a warm,
lighthearted look at the Yasin family before the Saddam
dictatorship, to the tale of Nabeel’s persecution and daring
flight, and the suspense-filled account of his family’s
rebellion against Saddam's regime, Nabeel's Song is an
intimate, illuminating, deeply human chronicle of a country
and a culture devastated by political repression and war.
Comments
No comments posted.
Registered users may leave comments.
Log in or register now!
| 
© 2003-2024 off-the-edge.net
all rights reserved Privacy Policy