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A Memoir of Food, Love, and War
Free Press
February 2011
On Sale: February 1, 2011
400 pages
ISBN: 1416583939
EAN: 9781416583936
Hardcover
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Non-Fiction
In the fall of 2003, Annia Ciezadlo spent her honeymoon in
Baghdad. Over the next six years, while living in Baghdad
and Beirut, she broke bread with Shiites and Sunnis,
warlords and refugees, matriarchs and mullahs. Day of Honey
is her memoir of the hunger for food and friendship—a
communion that feeds the soul as much as the body in times
of war. Reporting from occupied Baghdad, Ciezadlo longs for normal
married life. She finds it in Beirut, her husband’s
hometown, a city slowly recovering from years of civil war.
But just as the young couple settles into a new home, the
bloodshed they escaped in Iraq spreads to Lebanon and
reawakens the terrible specter of sectarian violence. In
lucid, fiercely intelligent prose, Ciezadlo uses food and
the rituals of eating to illuminate a vibrant Middle East
that most Americans never see. We get to know people like
Roaa, a determined young Kurdish woman who dreams of
exploring the world, only to see her life under occupation
become confined to the kitchen; Abu Rifaat, a Baghdad book
lover who spends his days eavesdropping in the ancient
city’s legendary cafés; Salama al-Khafaji, a soft-spoken
dentist who eludes assassins to become Iraq’s most popular
female politician; and Umm Hassane, Ciezadlo’s sardonic
Lebanese mother-in-law, who teaches her to cook rare family
recipes—which are included in a mouthwatering appendix of
Middle Eastern comfort food. As bombs destroy her new
family’s ancestral home and militias invade her Beirut
neighborhood, Ciezadlo illuminates the human cost of war
with an extraordinary ability to anchor the rhythms of daily
life in a larger political and historical context. From
forbidden Baghdad book clubs to the oldest recipes in the
world, Ciezadlo takes us inside the Middle East at a
historic moment when hope and fear collide. Day of Honey is
a brave and compassionate portrait of civilian life during
wartime—a moving testament to the power of love and
generosity to transcend the misery of war.
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