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A Hundred and One Days : Asne Seierstad.
When the author entered Baghdad in
2003 with the aim of staying for three months and reporting on
the war and its effect on the comman people, she realised the
near-impossibility of the job. She was given a 10-day visa, which
she was to constantly renew by appeasing a stoic visa officer
with flattery, and a “minder” and interpreter, Takhlef,
whose job was to steer her away from the “truth”
and play up Iraq’s despitic ruler Saddam
Hussain to the foreign press. Overcoming the odds though,
the author of the best-selling The Bookseller Of Kabul gets her
story on the fear and poverty that ravage the Iraqi people uncle
an aoppressive regime.
Brief : Here’s
what you didn’t read in the papers. Virago,
Rs. 275. |
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