Author(s): Raymond Tallis

Popular Science

If you can't protect yourself from a tyrant, how can you protect your family? And how does a proud man live with the knowledge that he can't? Reminiscent in part of "Stasiland" and "The Bookseller of Kabul", this is the story of one family's struggle to survive the iniquities of Saddam Hussein's savage dictatorship. It is a career-defining book for Wendell Steavenson.Father, husband, soldier, believer: General Kamel Sachet was a favourite of Saddam Hussein's, a decorated hero of the Iran-Iraq war, in charge of Kuwait City during Desert Storm. But Sachet was also a devoted family man. His wife, sons and daughters revered him, depended on him, suffered for him, and in the end grieved for him as he realized, too late, that he had become a participant in the terror regime that had strangled his country and destroyed its people.In "The Weight of a Mustard Seed", Wendell Steavenson tells the story of Kamel Sachet and those closest to him - his wife, his sons and daughters, his friend a psychiatrist, the head of the Republican Guard, a director of Abu Ghraib prison - during Saddam's four wars and brutal repression, the years of hard-bitten sanctions, and the internecine anarchy of the American occupation.