Baghdad Diaries: A Woman's Chronicle of War and Exile

I'd like to point out in case the other reviews don't really flag this - Nuha Al-Radi is a really funny writer with a great, sardonic style. She's a well-connected, aristocratic Iraqi woman who lives in a devastated country and while the bombs fall she potters about her studio worrying about her kilns. She eventually had to sell them for money (to Saddam's people, who used them as pizza ovens!) She has a great eye for the ironies of life under Saddam's regime and has that ability to pick out all that is dysfunctional about her culture and criticize it, without becoming self-loathing. Everything she says about the Americans are self-evident to those of us who oppose the current Iraq war - in fact there are some great observations of hers where we are convinced that it's madness for the CIA to keep accusing Saddam of making sophisticated weapons when he and his people are so dumb they can't even get basic things right. I got a very real, vivid feel of the Iraqi as a proud, cultured people, which is an important perspective to have since we only see them as the receiving end of our bombs. At times this book reads like the Diary of Anne Frank - ironically, this time we are the Nazis.

Eye witness account of events in Baghdad by an Iraqi artist, Nuha Al-Radi kept diaries over a period of about 10 years beginning with the 1991 war, covering the period of sanctions, her own periods away from Iraq, and ending in March 2003 when the current occupation was about to begin. Though the book flows easily and is often humorous, she is not really a great writer, much of her day to day descriptions are quite mundane even involving detail about her dog and his life, and so many different names of friends and acquaintances mentioned it is impossible to keep track. However this adds to the book's effectiveness, the ordinariness of the people is a backdrop to the massive bombing, environmental devastation and later the sickness and birth defects. This is not a book that discusses larger issues but is told entirely from the perspective of innocent civilians, here where Al-Radi resides the US/UK is perceived as doing more damage than Saddam. Excellent choice for those interested in stories from inside Iraq.