City of Widows: An Iraqi Woman's Account of War and Resistance

In her opening line, Iraqi novelist (and former prisoner of Saddam Hussein) Zangana lays out this Iraq primer's unapologetic intent: “that readers in the West will gain insight into a country they have impacted so fully and terribly.” With 300,000 widows in Baghdad alone, another million across the country, and thousands of women imprisoned without acknowledgment—much less hope for legal recourse—Zangana's dispatches are different from those of U.S. and Iraqi officials who, she says, claim to support “women's empowerment” while sponsoring militant sectarian forces with “barbaric ideas” about women in society. The U.S. media, according to Zangana, is happy to fall in line: by repeating the story that Iraqis are killing Iraqis by the hundreds each day, the American reflex has become to blame the victims, rather than an occupation that has deliberately dismantled the country's ways of coping. Putting the current moment in perspective with an engaging history of women's rights in Iraq, Zangana convincingly identifies the current Iraqi moment as “a terrible state of regression.” This angry, unforgiving and powerful book is as vital as it is hard to swallow. (Nov.)