|
Salam Pax The Clandestine Diary of an Ordinary Iraqi by Salam Pax Selected as one of The Advocate’s Top 10 Books ISBN: 0-8021-4044-0 / ISBN-13: 978-0-8021-4044-9 US $13.00 - 5 1/2 x 8 1/4, 224 pp - Oct. 2003 |
“Please stop sending emails asking if I were for real, don’t believe it? Then don’t read it. I am not anybody’s propaganda ploy, well except my own. 2 more hours until the B52’s get to Iraq.”—Salam Pax
Salam Pax has attracted a huge worldwide readership for the Internet diary he kept during the buildup, prosecution, and aftermath of the war in Iraq. Bringing his incisive and sharply funny Web postings together in print for the first time, Salam Pax provides one of the most gripping accounts of the Iraq conflict and will be the subject of global media attention.
In September 2002, a twenty-nine-year-old Iraqi architect calling himself “Salam Pax” began posting daily accounts of everyday life in Baghdad onto the Internet. Written in English, these postings contained everything from descriptions of the hardships of life in Saddam Hussein’s paranoid regime, to reviews of the latest (pirate) CDs by Coldplay and Bjork, to gossip about his employers. Salam daily risked retribution from Saddam’s regime, as more than 200,000 people went missing under Saddam, many for far lesser crimes than the open criticism of the regime that Salam voiced in his diary.
Salam Pax’s sharp, candid, and often dryly funny articles soon attracted a worldwide readership. In the months that followed, as a huge American-led force gathered to destroy Saddam’s hated regime, Salam’s Internet diary became a unique record of the anticipation, anger, resentment, humor, and sheer terror felt by an ordinary man living through the final days of Saddam Hussein’s twenty-five-year dictatorship, and the aftermath of its destruction.
Salam Pax is an astonishing record of the last days of Saddam and the clandestine diary of an ordinary Iraqi.
Links
Salam Pax's Internet Diary
Salam Pax website
Interview with Salam Pax by Terry Gross on NPR's Fresh Air