truth be told; Two memoirs burst with the immediacy of news headlines.(Between Two Worlds: Escaping from Tyranny: Growing Up in the Shadow of Saddam)(Jesus Land)

Byline: Kate Bolick

When Saddam Hussein was captured two years ago, Zainab Salbi witnessed the event along with the rest of the world: on a television monitor. But she saw more than a fallen despot emerging from a hole in the dirt. Behind that untamed beard she recognized the man who, as she knew from spending her adolescence within his most intimate circles, smelled of cologne, carried boxes of Chivas Regal to parties, and suffused every room he entered with "fear incarnate." Today Salbi enjoys a global reputation for her social activism as the founder of the nonprofit organization Women for Women International, but in Iraq she's known as the daughter of one of Hussein's personal pilots.

Salbi can't pinpoint when she realized the man she "greeted with kisses on the hollows of his cheeks" was a murderer, but with a child's vigilance she watched her parents become shadows of themselves. Hussein's capture liberated Iraq from its stranglehold of fear, and Salbi, by then 34, from her self-imposed silence. Though she had spent years traveling to war-torn spots urging rape victims to tell their stories, she hadn't admitted to anyone but her husband the traumas of her own childhood. Within months of Hussein's arrest she began writing Between Two Worlds: Escaping from Tyranny: Growing Up in the Shadow of Saddam (Gotham Books), her fearlessly candid memoir about weathering the eighties under his tyrannical thumb. ...